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S I^o^^ not to do it 

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■I? QW to do it 
ffl^la^ina Fay peirce 

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



> 



CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING 



"Where is there any station higher than the ordering of the 

house ? " — GOETKE. 

" Civilization is co-operation. Union and Liberty are its 
factors." — Henry George. 



Co-operative Housekeeping 

HOW NOT TO no IT AND 
HOW TO DO IT 



BY 



[^ 



MELUSINA FAY PEIRCE 



A 



-/5 



"Wf^ 






FEB 2 1S84 



BOSTON 

JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY 

1884 






Copyright, 1884, 
By Melusina Fay Peirce. 



A/l rights reserved. 



PEEFACE. 



The substance of the following Study in Sociology 
was read in Chicago as a paper on Co-operative 
Housekeeping at the annual meeting of the Illi- 
nois Social Science Association in the autumn of 
1880. The writer commends it, not only to the 
earnest attention, but also to the discussion of the 
educated housekeepers of the country. If Co- 
operative Housekeeping be not the solution of the 
present aspect of the woman question, there must 
be some other. Why will not women address 
themselves strenuously to the task of studying and 
adapting themselves intelligently to their own era, 
instead of drifting along and letting the era do 
with them what it will? 

That noble and sympathetic man, the late Pro- 



6 PKEFACE. 

fessor Benjamin Peirce, of Harvard University, 
once said in my hearing : " I don't believe in 
victims. There are no victims. We make or mar 
ourselves," — and the thought certainly contains 
the profoundest truth. If not entirely just to the 
individual, it is perfectly so to the race — to the class. 
Too long have women — like the Irish ! — posed and 
paraded as " victims." The fact is, their prestige, 
their privilege, their position, are largely in their 
own hands. They can • make ' themselves if they 
will, or they can allow men to continue to * mar ' 
them. But men cannot make them ! That is as 
certain as that men cannot walk for them. They 
must use their own minds and their own energies 
to solve their own problems, just as they use 
their own limbs for their own locomotion. To 
expect men to think out and wisely shape the des- 
tinies of women is to expect too much. No matter 
how much stronger, intellectually, they may be 
than we, they are not strong enough for that. They 
can take care of their own side of the house, as 
the saying is, and that is all they can take care 



PREFACE. 



of. Magnificently have they done, and are they 
doing this — and to the shame and disgrace of 
the contrasting feminine inertia. It is the high- 
est time that women, too, were up and doing. But 
they can do nothing single-minded, single-handed. 
To accomplish an adequate womanly work in the 
world, they must employ the Method of Civiliza- 
tion. They must first consult, then act together. 
If the Co-operative Housekeeping which I advo- 
cate be not the best way, let them look until they 
find a better way. But let them look, and let 
them look in company, as when men seek in the 
forest a missing child. 

It is true that women cannot act together with- 
out the permission, expressed or understood, of men. 
But would men withhold that permission ? 

In my youth two proverbs of George Herbert's 
collection made upon me a profound impression. 

The first was—" Nothing is to be despaired of or 
presumed on." The second—" There is a remedy 
for every evil could men find it." I hate, I 
scorn the phrase, " necessary evil." It is the 



8 PREFACE. 

watcli-word of the enemies of God and the deprav- 
ers of man. I will not for a single instant admit 
that ayiy evil is *' necessary," and I will always 
ardently believe that God has indeed provided the 
" remedy " for every evil, but that for our develop- 
ment He has imposed upon ourselves the task of 
finding it. 

I commend to the practical housekeepers of the 
country, and especially to its professional lady- 
cooks, if so I may call them, — Miss Corson, Miss 
Parloa, Mrs. Ewing, "Marion Harland," Mrs. 
Miller, Mrs. Henderson and others — the conven- 
ing of an Annual Congress for the discussion of 
the Housekeeping Peoblem alone. 

Melusina Fay Peirce. 
Chicago, January, 1884. 



COH"TEH"TS. 



OHAPTEB. FAGB. 

I. Men and Women Contrasted, . • 13 

II. The Housekeeping Anarchy, . . 23 

III. Mr. Charles W. Elliott's Indictment of 

Civilization, 43 

IV. The Pioneer in Co-operative House- 

keeping, 57 

V. *' How Not to Do It,". ... 75 

VI. How to Do It, 85 

VII. The Obstacle to Co-operative House- 
keeping, 106 

VIII. The Waste of the "Girl op the 

Period," 113 

IX. Women in the State 129 

X. Conclusion, * 152 



Appendix, ^^"^ 



"Let the past alone : do not seek to renew it ; press on to higher and 
letter things,— at all events to other things; and be assured that the 
right way can never be that which leads you back to the identical 
shapes that you long ago left behind. Onward, onward, onward!" 

—Hawthorne. 



CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 



MEN AND WOMEN CONTRASTED. 

The infinite difference between a stone and an 
animal, between savagery and civilization, between 
life and death, and (taken collectively) between 
meii and ivomen, is comprehended in a single word 

— ORGANIZATION. 

What is a nation? An organization of men in 
which women are only passive and disconnected 
units. What is a State — a county — a town — a 
village ? The same. What is a church ? Very 
nearly the same. What is a railroad or any other 
corporation in which women are stock -owners? 
The same. What is our public school system ? An 
organization of men wherein women are only em- 



14 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

ployes. What are business and manufacturing 
firms of every description ? Organizations of two 
or more men with almost never an active woman 
partner among them. Look where we will, we 
find the great business of the world carried on by 
men working in organizations. Nearly every man 
in the community is locked into half a dozen of 
them. He is an organic part of his nation, of his 
State, of his county, of his town, of his ward, often 
of his church, and frequently of one or more busi- 
ness undertakings, besides which there may be his 
club memberships, political, or social, or athletic, 
his Free Masonry, his Odd Fellowship, his Temper- 
ance Association, and so on and on through the 
whole round of duties and interests that constitute 
the external sphere of civilized and christian man- 
hood. 

And what is the grand object of all this organ- 
ized effort on the part of the stronger sex ? 

In the first place, of course, self-preservation. 
Every man's first object in life is to keep himself 
alive, and to do this he has to earn his own living 



THE GRAND CONTEAST. 15 

and to make and uphold laws that will protect his 
life and his property. 

But if men had always had this duty to per- 
form for themselves only, probably they never 
would have emerged from the supposed primitive 
state wherein every man kills his own prey and de- 
fends his own person with weapons formed by his own 
hands. The immense reserve force of individual 
self-control and self-discipline which renders a civ- 
ilized society possible, might never have been de- 
veloped if men had lacked the mighty incentive of 
the protection and support of defenceless women 
and children — in other words, of the family — to 
provide for as well as for their own. In the sav- 
age (as in the typical club-man) this protecting 
and sustaining love of family hardly exists. His 
wife is to him but a beast of burden. He is su- 
premely absorbed in himself, and beyond hunting 
the game upon which his family lives, he gives 
himself no trouble about them. Excepting, per- 
haps, his weapons, his wives and daughters have 
to manufacture everything that he and they use 



16 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

even down to the tent-coverings that shelter 
him, and in case of removal, it is th^y who dis- 
mantle his frail dwelling, who bear it on their 
shoulders to the next halting place and who set it 
up again in the new encampment. The savage 
does absolutely nothing in company with his fel- 
low-men but hunt and fight and feast. Conse- 
quently the savage community never advances. It 
remains ag-e after ao;;e the same. 

Similarly, in our mining towns where multitudes 
of men are congregated together apart from family 
ties, they are said to become utterly reckless of the 
amenities of civilization. So far from caring about 
their property, their grand excitement after work- 
ing-hours is to gamble it away, and so far from 
preserving their lives, they risk them in paltry 
quarrels upon the slightest provocation. But as 
soon as the wives and children begin to move in, 
they immediately join Avith each other to enforce 
the laws, and to make sacred those lives and those 
earnings upon which the wives and children must 
depend. 



TUE GRAND CONTRAST. 17 

'Novr, if men have generally been the defenders 
and supporters of the family, what have women 
been ? They, leaving out of view their trifling 
function of maternity, and in spite of the myriad 
physical disabilities and infirmities imposed upon 
them by it, have universally been the clothers and 
feeders of the family out of the resources that men 
have placed at their disposal. Women have pre- 
pared the food, have made the garments, have or- 
dered the house, and — immense task that is too 
often lost sight of in the catalogue of feminine 
functions — have kept house and utensils and gar- 
ments clean. When the writer was a girl, our 
nearest neighbor was the most perfect housekeeper 
in the place. One day my sister passed her gate, 
and seeing her busy within her open front door, 
said, "Good morning! What are you doing ? " 
" Fighting the dirt, as usual," answered the veter- 
an — and in my own housekeeping experience the 
phrase has risen to my lips a thousand times as 
expressing in reality the largest and heaviest part 
of a housekeeper's cares. Sweeping, dusting, scrub- 



18 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

bing, dish and kettle washing, laundering — what is 
it all but "fi^ihtino; the dirt" that from countless 

<3 CD 

directions invades the household at every hour ? 

The executive functions of women to the family 
are, then, of precisely the same importance to it as 
• those of men ; for if men have given to society 
shelter, and security, and subsistence, women have 
given to it coinfort, and health, and beauty in just 
the deojree that cooked food and clothino; and 
cleanliness are more wholesome and enjoyable than 
are raw food, nakedness and dirt. 

But do women carry out their functions to so- 
ciety after the same manner that men do theirs? 

Oh the contrary, every woman does what she 
- has to do for her family either alone or with such 
assistance as the female relatives living within it, 
or as the female help hired or owned by her hus- 
band is able to afford her. 

The extraordinary social fact remains in the 
face of all the progress and enlightenment of the 
nineteenth century, that women have not as yet 
gone outside the home and joined hands and 



THE GKAND CONTRAST. 19 

brains for the better discbarge of their functions 
toward that home. As their fore- mothers did six 
thousand years ago, so are thej doing to-day. 
In the midst of the most advanced and complicated 
civilization the world has ever seen, one half of 
the adult population does all its work on the 
simple and primitive basis of savages ! 

And yet, which is supposed to love the family 
most? Is it the man or the woman? Has it not 
been said and sung a thousand times that no love 
equals the mother's love — that the father's is calm 
and cold in comparison? But calm and cold as it 
is, we have just seen that it is the motive which 
impelled men to build up all this mighty civiliza- 
tion of which they are so justly proud. 

How strange, that though loving and thinking 
for the family so much less than does the woman, 
the civilized husband and father has nevertheless 
been so much more sagacious in his methods of 
caring for it — of performing his part toward it — 
than the civilized wife and mother ! 

It is this tremendous social negation — nay, this 



20 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEIvEEPING. 

paradox of our superb century of organized effort 
in every direction, which should be most strenu- 
ously pressed upon the attention of all those •who 
are interested in social problems, for there is no 
doubt whatever that this Unorganization of Women 
among Themselves for the best and most econom- 
ical fulfilling of their housewifely duties toward 
the world in which they live, is the very greatest 
evil with which contemporary society has to con- 
tend. 

Rather, as far as women are concerned, it is the 
ONE EVIL against the host of whose manifestations 
society is blindly struggling, and of which it never 
gets the better, for it is in vain to cut off one and 
another of the hundred heads of the hydra, so long 
as the giant neck upon which they all grow and 
flourish is not itself severed. For half a generation 
has this deadly, soundless struggle between the 
monster and society been visible to one person at 
least. Often have I pointed it out to my fellow- 
women, and now I am beginning to ask myself, 
almost in despair — " Will they ever see it, or, see- 



TOE GKAND CONTRAST. 21 

ing, have the will to rise and slay this formless, 
chaotic ' Demon of the Threshold ' that is keep- 
ing the whole world poor, hindering the advance 
of the Kingdom of Christ on earth, smothering in 
its murky, hateful folds all the brightest, most bril- 
liant, most ethereal qualities of our sex, and plung- 
ing yearly thousands of ignorant, heedless, uncared- 
for girls into the unspeakable horrors and degrada- 
tion of prostitution. 

Let the house-mother who reads this, glance 
round the room in which she is sitting — let her 
look down upon the articles of her machine-spun, 
machine-woven and machine-sewed garments — let 
her remember all the surroundings and objects of 
beauty and use that belong to the home in which she 
lives and moves and has her being, and then let her 
ask herself why she is in the enjoyment of them 
all, instead of crouching on the ground in a smoky 
wigwam with unkempt hair and a tattered deer- 
skin for her only garment? Why, but that the 
men of her race have for generations used their 
brains and their sympathies and helped each other, 



22 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

until by little and little they have lifted themselves 
and her up to where she and they are. 

If, on the contrary, they had done as she has 
always done and still is doing, she would still be in 
a wigwam and a deer-skin tunic with her savage 
sisters, for, like them, she is taking care of her 
family with her own unaided mental and physical 
strength, or with such only as her sisters or her 
daughters or her servants can give her. 



II. 

THE HOUSEKEEPING ANARCHY. 

It is a too-familiar story, but let us take a com- 
prehensive glance at the practical situation of all 
educated American housekeepers to-day. 

I. In the first place, they are all buyers. The V^ 
first thing they do every morning of their lives 
after finishing breakfast, is to order on credit or 
buy for cash from the provision dealer and the gro- 
cer, the materials for the meals of the ensuing 
twenty-four hours. About three days out of six, 
after the household has been ordered and settled, 
the next thing is to go out and buy materials or 
trimmings to be put into the garments they are en- 
gaged in making — for woman's sewing, like 
woman's cooking and cleaning, is never done. 

But women are not buyers as men are. One 
man buys wheat, another cattle, another iron, an- ^ 



24 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

other tea, another wool, and so on — each his own 
specialty for his own business. Women, on 
the contrary, are all buyers in larger or smaller 
quantities, and in better or worse qualities, of the 
same things. 

Is it not wonderful that none of them have ever 
clubbed together in numbers sufficient to buy at 
wholesale and then divide the goods among them- 
selves as they want them, and so save the profits 
which, from the retailer down to the producer, the 
middle-men make out of them, and which the co- 
operative stores of England have proved to be no 
less than from ten to fifteen dollars out of every hun- 
dred they spend — an appalling sum out of the 
aggregate expenditure of any family, whether its 
yearly outlay be large or small. 

This retail buying of house-mistresses, then, we 
must put down as, on the present system. House- 
keeping Stupidity and Extravagance Number One. 

II. In the second place, house-mistresses are not 
only all buying the same things — they are all doi7ig 
precisely the same things, and they are doing them 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANARCUT. 25 

all the time, — for ail housekeepers are engaged 
every day either in cooking, sewing and laundry 
work themselves, or in directing servants who are 
doing them. 

Is it not still more wonderful that it has never oc- 
curred to any neighborhood of housekeepers how 
much more easily, perfectly, and economically their 
housekeeping would be accomplished if they would 
all take hold and do it together ? 

What fearful waste for the whole country is 
involved by the conditions of its cookery alone — a 
separate cook and a separate fire for each family, 
whether that family consist of two or of twenty 
persons ! 

The entire house-work and dish- washing and table 
setting of the great Wellesley College of three 
hundred girls in Massachusetts, is done by those 
girls in just forty-five minutes out of the twenty- 
four hours. 

Miss Corson, of the Cooper Institute Cooking 
School, in New York, has within a few years 
trained ten children between the ages of ten and 



26 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

fifteen, to do all the cooking for an institution ol 
a hundred and fifty persons. 

Before spinning and weaving were carried on in 
mills by steam machinery, it took all the women 
in the world all the time they could spare from their 
other household duties to manufacture a scanty 
supply of home-spun linens and woollens for their 
families. From the duchess to the peasant, all 
women were at the distaff or the loom, and even so, 
large classes of men had to dress to a great extent 
in leather to make up for the deficiency of textile 
fabrics. 

To-day, ^'it would require the labor of every man, 
woman, and child on the face of the earth — over a 
thousand million persons — to do with the spinning 
wheel and the loom what is now done by less than a 
million and a half of operatives in this and other 
countries in cottori' alone ! * 

This is the way that men do women's work when 
they set about it, and if all women were to dis- 

*Mr. C. C. Coffin, of Boston, before the Congressional Labor 
Committee, of which Mr. Abram S. Hewitt was chairman. 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANARCHY. 27 

appear from the earth to-morrow, in case men 
thought it worth while to keep on with housekeep- 
ing at all, would they carry it on in the present 
woman-fashion? Would each begin cooking his 
own food, and making, yfashing, and mending his 
own clothes and that of his boys with the help of 
another hired man ? The idea is laughable. We 
know that at once some men would take charge of all ] 
the cooking, others of all the sewing and mending, J 
others of the washing and ironing, and still others 
of the scrubbing and cleaning. Houses would be 
built and labor-saving machinery would be con- 
trived to meet the new order of things, and three 
men out of four — nay, nine men out often would 
keep on doing just what they are doing now. 

Another painful reflection is that so much of 
the pleasure of housekeeping labor is . lost by 
bearing all its burdens alone instead of in associa- 
tion. Fairs and festivals are very hard work, but 
why do w^omen so continually get them up in ad- 
dition to all their daily duties, if there be not a great 
deal of genuine enjoyment in bending their ener- 



28 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

gies toward a common object? Why are people 
generally more cheerful and more contented in the 
city than in the country, unless it be from the 
closer contact of human beings with each other 
which city life involves? 

A lady who went out in the first ship that car- 
ried wives to San Francisco after the gold-rush of 
1849, told the writer that when they first landed 
everything was so in the rough — conveniences and 
utensils were so scarce and servants so impossible, 
that the handful of women who had happened to go 
out together, simply took hold and did all their 
housekeeping in common. Said she : " It was 
like one long frolic, and we have often said we 
never enjoyed anything so much in our lives. 
Cooking, washing, house-work, ironing — we did it 
all together, and were merry over it from morning 
until night." 

What a pity that it did not occur to these 
pioneer housekeepers that the way they had begun 
housekeeping in that new and distant land would 
be the very best way to keep on ! — for then might 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANARCHY. 29 

the great problem of Christendom have been 
solved in that youngest and remotest of civilized 
communities forty years ago. American women 
would then betimes have serried themselves against 
the dreadful evils that corrupt and crafty Asia 
was waiting to let loose upon them, and instead of 
the ship-loads of miserable Chinese of both sexes 
who are brought like cattle over here to under- 
mine the American family, the breezes that blew 
from the mighty young RepuMic across the Pacific 
could have whispered hope and redemption even to 
the trebly degraded women of those old pagan 
monarchies, for they would have told them that 
Co-operative Housekeeping--which means the 
highest elevation of Wifehood and the final apothe- 
osis of Home — was born ! 

This carrying on of the three trades or indus- 
tries which make up American housekeeping — 
viz., cooking, laundering and sewing — by each 
housekeeper, without the help and co-operation 
of other housekeepers, we must, then, in simple 



30 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

common-sense, label *' Housekeeping Stupidity 
and Extravagance Number Two." 

JII. But to me the crowning stupidity of all is 
to be found in the universal conviction that all 
housekeepers and all servants are capable of carry- 
ing on three trades at once with skill, despatch, 
ajid success. 

The very commonest element of wonder in a 
man's mind is that he should ever find a badly 
cooked dish upon his table, or a badly ironed shirt 
or an unmended garment of any kind in his 
drawer. 

In like manner the very commonest complaint 
of house-mistresses to each other, is that of the un- 
accountable inefficiency and slowness of their 
servants. 

"I'm sure," have I often heard my friends re- 
mark, " if I were doing the same things over and 
over again as my servants are, I could learn to do 
them exactly right, and to get through my work 
in half the time that they do." 

Ah, thoughtless women ! if your servants could 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANATlCnY. 31 

bring to their work the quick and fine perceptions 
of a lady's educated brain, thej would not have 
their own strong and enduring nerves and muscles 
with which to do it. The two elements are not 
found together. I never in my life met with any- 
thing more pathetic than the following letter to the 
editor of Harper s Blagazine (July, 1867), from a 
farmer's wife of evident talent, culture and refine- 
ment. Nor is the case peculiar. The poor victim 
spoke then, and owing to the increased complica- 
tions of the servant question all over the land, 
she speaks with still stronger emphasis now, for 
ten thousands of her delicate countrywomen : — 

** Think of raising your head from your pillow on the dawn 
of a midsummer morning, startled by the sleepless con- 
sciousness that there is ever so much work to bo done, and 
you must be up and about it. But your head aclies; you 
have not slept and rested long enough ; you are tired yet ; for 
you were up till after ten o'clock mending your child's dress ; 
your hands feel nerveless and very unfit to begin another 
round of toil. But you must stop thinking how good it would 
seem just to rest an hour longer. The work must be done, 
and you must do it alone ; there is nobody to help. Why do 



y 



32 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

you linger ? You will be sorry when the heat comes down, for 
every minute lost of this cool hour. Impelled by stern re- 
solve the unwilling body moves. You are up and dressed 
and run first to skim the milk. Then the fire must be made. 
Where is the wood ? There's none in the yard, and you have 
already picked up all the old pieces round the fences near by. 
True, a man with an ax would have plenty in three minutes, 
but it was forgotten. Breakfast is expected at half-past six; 
you must have some wood. Here is an old board which was 
' shaky ' in its prime ; being now very much decayed it will 
break by stepping on it ; draw it along, and here in the barn- 
yard are some pieces which the cattle have broken, quite an 
armful in all. It has taken many minutes of precious time 
to get the wood, and now do you pause in going back to drink 
in the beauty of the morning ? to look while your soul grows 
larger, on the blue sky dotted and ribboned with clouds ? on 
the wide, dewy fields and the circling woods, robed in the 
glory of summer? You pause not. Your eyes are fixed on 
the kitchen door, toward which you move rapidly in a right 
line. You might almost as well be an engine running through 
a tunnel, as far as looking on the outer world is concerned. 

** Your fire is made, breakfast is cooking, and very warm 
it grows around the stove, and very faint you grow bending 
over it. Your flat-irons are heating, your birds are up crying 
for bread-and-butter. You sink down on the door step, and slip 
their clothes on them swallowing the cool air; but there's 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANARCHY. 33 

something Iburning on the stove; you must breathe the hot 
steam again, while the cry for bread-aud-hutter grows more 
fervent. Hurry now, move your hands fast ; you may get the 
coarse ironing done before time to set the table. 

" Well, it is done, and the family are down to breakfast, 
but you can not eat — indeed you don't have time to eat. You 
know how things should be done, but you could not get every- 
thing on the table in time ; there's a spoon wanted, then water, 
and maybe something else. It is not a family reunion; it is to 
some a time to eat ; to one a time to wonder if things will ever 
be any different ; to you a time to think how they can be dif- 
ferent ; why there must be so much warm food in warm 
weather; and to try — vain attempt ! — to simplify the day's 
work. But there it is, a great fact ; victuals to be cooked in 
variety, to be placed on the table ; the inevitable dish- washing, 
knife-scouring, sweeping, and so much besides, that no one 
who has not gone through it can understand it. With all your 
dropping and transposing you can not change the relations of 
things. It is as hopeless as the trials you used to make to 
bring out values by forming three equations of two unknown 
quantities. 

" You keep your mouth close shut and don't mean to 
complain ; but after the hired man goes out you say to your 
husband, from sheer hopelessness, perhaps, *IfI only had 
somebody to help me to-day ! ' Ah, you might better have 
kept still. He is in debt, is working hard, and he knows that 



34 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

you are, and it irritates him, because he can not tell how to 
help it ; but he doesn' t know that your very life is being worked 
in to help along. He can not know, with his strength, how 
utterly hopeless you feel in your weakness ; so he says, *I don't 
know what to do ; I might as well give up one time as another; 
you'll have to have help, but I can hardly keep my head above 
water now.' How much better if you had kept still! you have 
taken all heart out of him for the day. So you sit with your 
aching head in your hands, while he goes to his work, and 
the children are out bareheaded, shouting in the sunshine. 

•' * I must try,' you resolve, breaking away from your 
thoughts and going to work — 'I must try writing again, and 
not give up till I succeed.' You have long been thinking of 
this, but could not get time. Now it is plain you must help 
yourself in some way ; the time must be taken from the mak- 
ing and mending; there will be more rags, but let that pass. 
So through the hot summer days you hasten the day's work 
and the week's work ; the washing, baking, ironing, and 
churning, to get space to cai-ry out your resolve, and just the 
hope and the effort help to take off the savageness of toil 
Sometimes pen and paper lie on the pantry shelf, and you 
drop down in a chair there to rest five minutes and write; and 
sometimes, as you sit for an hour in the afternoon in your 
muslin dress in 'the other room,' a habit of old days that you 
cannot get over, you write a little when no one is by. So, your 
piece is finished after a long time, and sent away, and you 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANAKCIIY. 35 

try not to think of it, but a small bright hope will live, hiddea 
away in your heart, till crushed out by the truth . 

"Another and another is seat to share the same fate. Yes, 
more than I will tell you of ; and now dear Easy Chair, would 
you keep trying or would you give up ? 

*'A Weak-minded Woman." 

Is that hapless one living still, I wonder ? Can 
her irrepressible heart-cry — echoing perhaps across 
her grave — be heard without tears ? I remember 
reading once the report of an Agricultural Meeting 
iri Massachusetts, at which it was said by one of 
the speakers that " as a rule, farmers were far more 
careful of their horses than of their wives, so that 
these latter not unfrequently die before their time 
from sheer over-work." 

I say, let any educated house-mistress who thinks 
she has the physical strength, try '' doing her own 
work" for six months, or if she will not try it, let 
her cease her unreasonable wonderings at the short- 
comings of her servants. On the contrary, the 
wonder is that with their uneducated brains, serv- 
ants contrive to keep the hundred details of their 
work so well in mind as they do. 



36 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

What man dreams of carrying on two, three, or 
more trades alternately all day long? A man 
does one thing ; he masters that one thing, and 
doesn't pretend or attempt the versatility that our 
barbaric system of individual housekeeping forces 
upon every woman and also upon every servant 
except those in hotels and rich houses. 

But the whole absurd tale is not yet told. 
Throughout the world of masculine labor, wherever 
the class of men which corresponds to the class of 
women-servants is employed, there universally we 
find a head-man or '' boss " either working with or 
over-seeing them, so that practically they are never 
unwatched. Though they have only one trade — 
nay, often but one process of one trade — to master, 
even that they carry on under ceaseless superin- 
tendence. The men who superintend them are 
either practical workmen themselves or they have a 
thorou2;h theoretical knowledi]i;e of how the work 
in hand should be done and of the result that 
is demanded. The wages accorded them are 
in proportion to their skill, and terms are made 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANARCHY. 37 

with them such that they can not without loss leave 
a situation without due notice beforehand to their 
employers. 

But the employes of housekeepers may decamp 
at any moment and demand their wages up to that 
moment. Their wages are rated, not by their indi- 
■ vidual skill, but by the kind of work to be per- 
formed, so that though a servant may not understand 
even how to boil a potato or broil a steak, yet if i^ 
be cooking she is undertaking, she calls herself a 
" cook " and demands and receives the same wao^es 

o 

that her mistress has just been paying a girl who 
has been in training with her for months. Installed 
in their kitchens, these ignorant servants get very 
little superintendence, but are left amid their mani- 
fold and delicate duties mostly to their own con- 
sciences, because their mistresses have generally to 
be in some other room at the endless tasks of the 
needle and the sewing-machine. 

Finally, and as the top-most stone of this Edifice 
of Confusion, the women who employ servants have 
for the most part paid little attention to housekeep- 



38 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

ing until they actually enter the houses they are to 
preside over. Too generally they find themselves 
in the mortifying and incompetent position of act- 
ually knowino' less than the crude, ignorant crea- 
tures they are attempting to direct. For fear of 
making mistakes before them, they often refrain 
from even tidying to make themselves practical 
cooks. Their husbands, poor men ! know not 
where rightly to place the responsibility, as they 
continually hear the servants abused and depre- 
ciated, and so the housekeeping drags through its 
five, ten, fifteen or more years of dislocation, often 
to be ended as a relief by life in boarding-houses 
and hotels. 

It seems to me that the utter irrationality of the 
American domestic system could not be more com- 
plete. Let women give up in future a phrase that 
conveys no adequate impression, and let them clear- 
ly define their positions to themselves and the world 
by carefully saying in future of the young bride 
whose husband has furnished a home for her to pre- 
side over — not, " They are going to housekeeping," 



THE IIOUSEKEEPIXG ANARCHY. 39 

but, *' She is going to carry on three trades at once." 
No matter ^vhat her taste or talent or training or 
health may be, she must do just this that all married 
women are doing — she must carry on tlwee relentless 
trades at once, and yet, so great is the intrinsic dif- 
ficulty of the task, such the physical strain and 
mental grasp that it requires, that only the inherited 
habit of ages enables women to do it at all, and only 
women of exceptional capacity can do it well. How- 
ever little literary or oth^r culture a woman may 
have, if she be a successful house-mistress, she is an 
able ivoman^ and had she been a man, would proba- 
bly with no greater expenditure of mental force 
have won for herself both money and position be- 
yond the average. 

At this point the would-be critic of the modern 
woman may very appositely object that even if the 
modern housewife have three trades to carry on at 
once, it is many less than- her fore-mothers of only 
two hundred years ago energized and directed, 
since to her cooking, laundering and sewing they 
added spinning and weaving, the making of butter 



40 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

and cheese, of soaps, perfumes, candles, stockings 
and gloves, the salting and pickling of meats for 
■winter's use, and the putting up of medicines and 
liniments for* sickness. With such a remnant of 
ancestral industries left her, and with such infi- 
nitely greater conveniences for carrying them on, 
why does the modern woman so often prove herself 
averse, if not absolutely unequal, to what is de- 
manded of her ? 

The answer is— Because there has been a trans- 
formation in two fundamental directions : First, 
in the house-mistress herself. Second, in her 
servants. 

The historic housewife was devoted from baby- 
hood to household avocations, and she had no 
other interests. The girl of the olden time never 
travelled, never studied, never read. She had 
scarce any education except her domestic educa- 
tion, and scarcely any intellectual horizon outside 
her home. The modern girl receives, on the con- 
trary, if neither a profound or thorough, at least 
a wide-glancing culture that occupies and interests 



THE HOUSEKEEPING ANAKCHY. 41 

at every point all the mind she has, and makes it 
difficult for her to concentrate her solicitude on the 
narrow area of her immediate family. She has a 
dozen tastes and accomplishments of Avhich her 
great-grandmothers never dreamed, and which she 
is almost irresistibly impelled to spend both time 
and money in gratifying. 

But these mental distractions of the liouse-mis- 
tress would be but a small disadvantage to her 
family if she had at her command the household 
service that existed everywhere, even so late as a 
hundred years ago. For the servants of all cen- 
turies except our own were either serfs, slaves, or 
the descendants of serfs and slaves, who were as 
much fixtures in the family as if they were owned 
there. Free household servants who come and go 
as they like, or who do as much or as little in 
return for their wages as they see fit, are as purely 
a modern development as are the delicate and un- 
trained mistresses who employ them. One is the 
fitting pendant to the other. Both are the inevit- 
able products of the conditions amid which they 
have developed, and they are so unsuitable and in- 



42 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

adequate to their day and generation, because in 
an age of the combination of capital, the organiz- 
ation of labor, and the individual freedom of the 
working classes, women are attempting to carry on 
the domestic industries collectively called " house- 
keeping" on the isolated system developed in the 
by-gone milleniums of domestic servitude, though 
the comfort and economy of that system depended 
on the absolute ownership of the employees by the 
employer! All the expensiveness and dislocation 
of modern housekeeping — all the disabilities and 
shortcomings of housekeepers — all the superfluous 
women and a large portion of the degraded women 
of Christian nations to-day — are due to the huge 
wastefulness and idiocy of the fact that in a century 
of dazzling intellectual light, and amid the methods 
of Freedom and Civilization, women alone of the 
corporate and industrial body hug themselves in 
their old Cimmerian darkness, and cling stupidly 
and stubbornly to the customs of Barbarism and 
of Slavery ! ! * 

^Appendix A. 



III. 

MR. CHARLES W. ELLTOTT'S INDICTMENT OF CIV- 
ILIZATION. 

The foregoing views are the basis of the series 
of five articles entitled " Co-operative Housekeep- 
ing" that appeared from the writer's pen in the 
Atlantic Monthly in the winter of 1868-9. 
Whether the theory is dead in the American mind, 
or whether it has merely been slumbering there all 
these years, I know not, but I am moved once 
again to attempt to call public attention to it on 
account of two noteworthy essays on the " woman 
question" that appeared last year in the North- 
American Itevieiv, viz.: Mr. Charles W. Elliott's 
*' Woman's Work and Woman's Wages" in the 
August number (1882), and Mrs. Julia Ward 
Howe's rejoinder in the succeeding !N"ovember one. 



44 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

Mr. Elliott's recent study of the problem brings 
him to precisely the same conclusion that mine did 
me fifteen or more years ago. He holds, and I 
am entirely of the same mind, that the supreme — 
nay, indispensable — good for women is to have each 
her own home and to earn her living there by the 
household services and other satisfactions which she 
renders her husband. But he maintains now, as 
I showed then, that what the world calls " civil- 
ization" (but what I beg to define as only the Or- 
r-ganization of Men among Themselves) by taking 
possession of the ancient feminine industries, and 
so making woman less needful to man, has made 
and is making her every year less and less finan- 
cially valuable to him. The women of a gentle- 
man's family are now largely burdens to him 
instead of helps. No matter how charming, how 
elevating, how indispensable as wives and daugh- 
ters they are to men's best safety and happiness, 
all the same they have literally to be "supported." 
They are expensive. Hence, as Mr. Elliott says, 
" Marriage is everywhere becoming more difficult for 



MK. ELLIOTT ON WOMEN. 45 

women and less desirable for men," and the final 
result is that more and more of the virtuous and 
industrious among women are yearly forced into 
the ranks of underpaid and overworked employes, 
and more and more of the idle and self-indulgent 
are tempted down into the miserable host of the 
disgraced and the depraved. 

The following sentences contain the substance of 
Mr. Elliott's views : 

* * * «< In the past the wives and women of great kings 
like Solomon and Csesar spun the wool and wove the cloth and 
made the garments of their husbands. Women then had plenty 
of work, and of as necessary and valuable a sort as that of men. 
Patriarch Abraham's wife made and baked the cakes for him 
and the visitors herself; she was a working- woman. To-day 
all this is changed. No queen works, no chieftain's wife 
works, no trader's wife works, no lady works, or wishes to 
work, or expects to work." 

"The variety and perfection of our machines have totally 
destroyed woman's great occupations of spinning, weaving 
and making clothes for men, as well as nearly all fabrics for 
their own wear. There remains only the universal and never« 
ending demand for cooked food, which women in a good de- 
gree yet supply. But even that is in danger ; for the public 



46 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPINa. 

baker is getting possession of the bread- making, and it is 
likely that central and co-operative cooking in towns will 
seize upon that last ono of women's industries." 

" It seems surprising, but it is a foct, that most women look 
upon this destruction of women's occupations with compla- 
cency, and consider that having nothing to do must be a bless- 
ing. The result is that to-day woman seems to be the least 
valuable of created beings." 

<<-K- * « ^ German professor computes that, taking the whole 
world for an average, a woman is worth about one-eighth of a 
man, and that as a rule, out of Europe, horses are more val- 
uable than members of the fair sex." 

<< * * * In Chinese civilization woman is of so little value 
that often a wet rag is laid upon the mouth of the new-born 
female child, and so there is one woman less in the world* 
The same, or a like practice, in a quiet way, prevails in Rus- 
sia, in Italy, and even in New York." 

" * * ■^ Must woman compete with man in the hard work 
of the world; and can she.? — Lqt,us see what that has brought 
her to in some countries. The report of our consul at Wurt- 
emburg says: *ln all parts of Wurtemburg may be seen wo- 
men splitting and sawing wood, . . . carrying heavy 
burdens of fuel, stone, etc., . . . threshing with the flail 
all day, . . . mounting the ladder with bricks and mor- 
tar, . . . performing the duties of scavenger, etc' This 
statement applies largely to women in all parts of Europe. 



MR. ELLIOTT ON WOMEN. 4« 

"* * * The effect of this kind of work upon woman is to 
make her common, coarse, ugly, dirty — undesirable, except as 
a beast of burden. Do women in America want to rival men 
in those occupations ? Another effect is, that such women, so 
worked, produce ugly, diseased and deformed children. An 
American observer in Berlin counted, as he walked the street, 
in half an hour, more than six such wretched beings upon 
whom the sins of those mothers had fallen. 

***** In some parts of Germany women work for fifty- 
seven cents a week, with which they house, clothe and feed 
themselves." 

* * * Of the sixty thousand feminine workers of New York ^ 
city, *' the average earning is but four dollars to four and a 
half per week. . . . How the vast army of single women 
live is known only to themselves." 

***** There are one hundred and fifty thousand poor wo- 
men who, according to Professor Fawcett, exist in London 
without adequate bread and with very insufiicient virtue." 

*'* * * Just so far as woman is forced, or foi-ces herself, 
into the labor market in competition with man, does she drag j \y 
down and cheapen man's labor. She makes no more work, | 
and only divides the existing work with man." 

"From the long, monotonous hours of toil to which women 
must submit in mills, printing-offices, sewing-rooms, etc., come 
many and various diseases — painful, exhausting, too often 
incapable of cure even under favorable conditions. . • • 



48 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

It has been found in England that for every death there are 
two constantly sick. ... In one year alone, in Massa* 
chusetts, there was among the workers a loss of time equal to 
over twenty-four thousand years from sickness and disability 
— or in wages at one dollar a day, a loss in money of over eight 
millions of dollars ! " 

<« * * * Women do say and must say, * If men will not marry 
us, we must work to live, even if it destroys us and the wages 
of men too.' " 

(( * * * Already there has grown up a very considerable 
and threatening rivalry between women and men. Woman 
often asserts and believes that man is and has been her oppres- 
sor ; that he is coarse, brutal, unjust, dishonest. The feeling of 
rivalry and hatred is growing too rapidly among women, and 
it is sure to be reciprocated by men. ' If they are to assert 
themselves against us, let them rough it as we do,' is common 
talk. The keen criticism of women by men is on the increase ; 
the keenwitsof women, sharpened by education, aggravated 
by her sense of implied inferiority and weakness and injustice 
are tending to make her a disagreeable companion and an un- 
desirable partner for life. Marriage is becoming more and 
more dangerous." 

" * * * It is quite common for young women to fancy that 
they are to mai-ry a man and be ' happy ;' that they are to bo 
the < idol ' of that man, and to receive everything and to do 
nothing. That they are not to be helpful, but are to be helped." 



ME. ELLIOTT ON WOMEN. 49 

***** The average man is often ignorant, rough, greedy, 
sensual. His coarser pleasures and wants consume his earn- 
ings. His tastes are thus vitiated, and the dull serenity of 
home life too often seems undesirable." 

***** So wide-spread has this neglect, indifference, or 
opposition to marriage (among men) now become, that in 
many countries the hatred of women themselves to illicit con- 
nections is becoming mitigated. We have reason to know 
that large numbers of well-bred women in England have given 
way to what they could not resist ; larger numbers in France 
engage in the business of un wedded love coolly, understand- 
ingly, simply as a business ; in due time they retire from 
their hard business, and seeking new quarters elsewhere, 
resume that life of respectability and virtue which for a time 
had been put away." 

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe in the November N'orth- 
American seeks to palliate, to offset by other con- 
siderations, Mr. Elliott's terrible and unanswer- 
able arraignment of the present status, but even 
she unguardedly admits that — 

*' One of the signs of the times is the growing inclination 
on the part of young men to withdraw themselves from the 
most improving of influences — the companionship of intelli- 
gent and cultivated women. A wave of materialism sweeps 



50 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPINO-. 

across the world to-day, which threatens to carry men and 
women in the direction of animal savagery from which all 
men spring, but in which no race should be content to abide. 
In fashionable life rude and boorish manners are cultivated." 

This latter is an imitation of the manners in 
voorue in Eng-hind, where for ten or fifteen vears it 
has been the fashion in the highest circles for so- 
called *' gentlemen " to be cavalier, neglectful, and 
discourteous toward ladies ! Endish women 
patiently put up with it. And why ? Because 
marriageable girls are such a drug in the market 
that they do not dare assert themselves, or their 
mothers for them, against their social lords and 
masters, for fear of losing the little of their com- 
panionship and attention, and the slight prospects 
of a betrothal that they have. Mrs. Lucas, a 
sister of John Bright, the statesman, told a friend 
of the writer that " English mothers no longer 
look upon marriage as a probable destiny for their 
daughters!'^ In the exclusive circles of the En- 
glish aristocracy and gentry alone there are many 
thousands of educated girls and ladies who are mere 



MR. ELLIOTT ON WOMEN. 51 

pensioners on their relations, and who have no 
more possibility of love and homes of their own 
than so many nuns in a convent, while so con- 
scious is the opposite sex of how ''valueless" are the 
women of their families, that even the boys at school 
are said carefully to conceal from each other as far 
as possible the existence of their sisters ! 

As for France, a quarter of a century ago Mich- 
elet opened his much talk ed-of book, '' La Femme," 
as follows: 

There is no one who does not see the capital fact of the time. 
The man lives separated from the looman. And that more and 
more. They are not only on different but parallel roads. They 
are like two travelers who set ont from the same station, the 
one slowly, the other at full speed, and on diverging tracks. 
The man, no matter liow feeble he may be morally, is none the 
less on a road of ideas, of inventions, and of discoveries, so 
rapid that the sparks fly from the burning rails. The woman, 
left fatally behind, remains on the threshold of a past which 
she hardly knows herself. She is distanced, for our misfor- 
tune, but she will not, or she can not, go faster. ... If 
our laws of succession did not make our women rich, men 
would no longer marry, at least in our large cities." 



52 CO-OPEEATIYE HOUSEKEEPING. 

At the upper end of the French social scale, then, 
the women do marry, because with their dowries 
they can buy themselves husbands. But how is it 
at the lower ? A recent editorial in the New York 
Sim says in substance — 

** It has become an axiom of the Parisian proletariat that a 
single woman can not make an honest living. . . . Mme. de 
Barran, who has made a special study of the subject, is con- 
vinced that the average daily wages paid for feminine labor 
in the French metropolis do not exceed forty cents, and a M. 
d 'Haussonville, who has recently collected facts relating to 
the wages of women for the Revue der deux Mondes, arrives at 
the same conclusion. As, according to these writers, the Pa- 
risian working-woman can not possibly subsist on less than 
fifty cents a day, the inference is unavoidable that the mass 
of Paris working girls are inexorably compelled to seek 
assistance from the other sex by their sheer inability to sup- 
port themselves. . . . Toil as persistently as they will, 
the majority, (think of that, the majority !) of unmarried 
working-women in Paris can hardly earn enough to keep body 
and soul together," and "it is undeniable that much of the 
sexual immorality which prevails in that city is directly trace- 
able to the frequent failure of the most conscientious effort on 
the part of working- women to earn an honest livelihood." 



MR. ELLIOTT ON WOMEN. 53 

Though in her answer to Mr. Elliott, Mrs. Howe 
tries in the main to look on the bright side, it seems 
to me that even the sentimentalism of a woman- 
suffragist should yield to the savagery of facts like 
these. Like causes must produce like results. 
The absolute inorganization of women in the midst 
of the highly complicated organization of men, must 
bring about in the new world the same state of 
things that it has brought about in the old, only, 
since with us society moves with the accelerated 
speed of the steam and the electricity that men 
have harnessed into its service, the end is coming 
upon American women far more quickly in pro- 
portion than it did upon the women of the older 
countries. ]^ay, before our very eyes the trans- 
formation is taking place. On every side our young 
men are rapidly segregating into clubs whose selfish 
and sensuous pleasures indispose them, and whose 
expenses debar them, from marriage. Their morals 
degenerate, their manners follow after, the com- 
panionship of unmarried young ladies becomes dis- 
tasteful and is deserted, and the number of lovable 



54 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

girls unchosen is growing palpably larger every 
year. American matrons of middle age in our 
*^ best society " have reason to congratulate them- 
selves that their youth was over before these for- 
midable rivals to married love and happiness, the 
club and its sister institution, the demi-monde, had 
been evolved. 

Alas ! nor need we go to France for those darkest 
features of a disordered civilization which invariably 
accompany a large and well-defined class of wives, 
daughters and courtesans who are " supported " 
merely — viz: white women working in the fields, 
and inwioralitif among working -girls enforced hy 
want. Already in all our large cities it is said that 
shops exist in multitudes where if a girl complain 
that she can not board and clothe herself upon her 
wages, she is told plainly by her employer that she 
must find a " friend ! " 

Of course the old stereotyped answer to this is 
that the demand for domestic servants in this country 
is greater than the supply, and that every girl can be 
comfortably and honorably maintained who will go 



MR. ELLIOTT ON WOMEN. 55 • 

out to service. So she can, but as we have just seen, 
it is contrary to the Spirit of the Age to carry on 
from two to three trades at once, as most girls in 
service have to do. Working-men do not do it — 
would not do it — and neither will working-women. 
"We must take men and women as we find them, and 
shape our institutions to fit human nature — not 
mutilate human nature to fit institutions. 

As for women's working in the fields, the divis- 
ion line between the eaiployments of the sexes, 
should be drawn at just one limit, viz., that bet^veen 
out-door and in-door labor. Except a little for 
health or pleasure, women should never work out 
of doors, because contact with the soil and exposure 
to the elements deprives them of precisely their 
special and most attractive external characteristics 
— their personal daintiness and the superior refine- 
ment and delicacy of their appearance. Up to 
twenty -five years ago no white women toiled in the 
fields of this republic, but now the degrading 
custom exists in many localities. 

Mr. Elliott's argument is summed up in ques- 



56 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

tions which it is the object of the present study 
in Sociology to answer : 

" Is that progress," he asks, ** is that civilization — which 
forces woman to unsex herself (in the fields, etc.); to enter 
into a race in competition with man in which she is sure to 
go down ; which brings her to starvation wages ; which in- 
volves a ruin of health and temper ; which forbids all enjoy- 
ment of life; which makes merchandise of human virtue ; — is 
that a civilization which woman ought to admire, defend and 
preserve?" — •' How to secure for woman, or restore her to 
her normal position and value, is one of the foremost ques- 
tions of the time, and is second to none. What can she her- 
self do to become again valuable ? What can she do to secure 
health, wealth and happiness for herself and for mankind ? " 

I answer — There is one thing, and only one, that 
women can do to accomplish this vast yet impera- 
tive result; and that is, to bring their great special 
work — their universal function — their househee-inng 
— into harmony with the spirit of their own gener- 
ation. In other words, OPtGANiZE it! — their house- 
hold buying on the basis of the Co-operative Store 
— their three household trades on the basis of Co' 
operative Manufacturing. 



IV. 

THE PIONEER IN CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

This possible organization of the chaotic modern 
housekeeping is no theory^ no Utopian vision 
merely. Its parallel exists in the world — a great, 
joyous, triumphant, almost miraculous fact, which 
women have first simply to copy in the spirit and 
almost in the letter, and afterward to go a little 
farther along the same road, and the riddle is read 
— the problem solved — the uselessness and ex- 
pensiveness of educated women to society and the 
consequent neglect and contempt of them by men, 
vanished. 

Housekeepers have not the capital wherewith to 
start large co-operative stores, kitchens, laundries, 
and sewing-rooms, and if they had, they have not, 
as Miss Kate Field's " Co-operative Dressmaking 
Association" has lately demonstrated, the business 



58 CO-OPEEATIYE HOUSEKEEPING. 

experience successfully to utilize it. On the other 
hand, all the money that men earn, or a large 
proportion of it, passes through their hands. They 
daily carry on three productive trades for the im- 
mediate benefit of the families over which they 
preside, and the capital with which they do this is 
the daily or weekly or monthly allowance made 
them by husbands and fathers for the purchase 
of their raw materials and for the wages of their 
servants. What, then, they must do is to imitate 
the Kochdale Pioneers, and with small, very small, 
savings from their housekeeping capital (not more 
than five dollars each would be required), they 
must stock and open small Co-operative Stores, re- 
investing their profits as they come in as so much 
added capital to these stores, until each one is a 
thoroughly stocked and perfectly appointed estab- 
lishment for the supply of all household needs. 
''Co-operative union," says Mr. Thomas Hughes, 
"carried on upon the Eochdale system, places in 
the hands of the poorer classes," (and would equally 
place in the hands of housekeepers) " without any 
burdensome effort on their part, this indispensable 



EOCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. 59 

condition of their effective action for mutual help, 
— Collective Income." 

The Rochdale Pioneers began forty years ago 
with a capital of $175.00, and twenty-eight share- 
holders. At first their only objects were to buy, and 
to sell at the usual retail prices,, groceries of good 
quality, strictly for cash, and with just weights and 
measures, and to divide the profits. At this 
writing they number over eleven thousand mem- 
bers, their capital is over two and a half millions 
of dollars, and a yearly profit of over ten per cent 
is divided among the members in proportion to 
their purchases. But what is especially to the 
point in discussing the possibilities of Co-operative 
Housekeeping is the fact that "over twenty flour- 
mills, besides bread and biscuit bakeries and the 
manufacture of confectionery, soap, shoes and a few 
other articles, are now being carried on in Roch- 
dale more or less under the direction and for the 
benefit of the members of her co-operative stores."* 

* Miss Edith Simcox in Fr user's Magazine^ reprinted in tlio 
Eclectic Magazine for October, 1882. 



60 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

It seems to me that the obvious — nay, the mo- 
mentous question for housekeepers to ask them- 
selves is : " If partial table and household supplies 
like these can be manufactured from the stock-in- 
trade of a co-operative store, why can not nearly all 
household supplies be so manufactured ? " 

For my own part, I am so sure that they could 
be, that it has long been my earnest conviction that 
the ultimate mission of the Co-operative Store Soci- 
eties of England, which now number more than 
thirteen hundred in successful operation, is to show 
to American women the true and only road to co- 
operative HOUSEKEEPING ; and if the ladies who 
in 1870 tried the experiment in Cambridge, Mas- 
sachusetts, had only taken that road, their attempt 
would probably have been a success, and their 
Association the mother of many similar societies to- 
day. 

Shrewd and practical men, however, object to the 
Rochdale Co-operative Store System, because they 
say it only substitutes one set of distributing men 
for another. "At first," they argue, " the new set, 



EOCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. Gl 

the co-operators, will be willing to do the work some- 
what more cheaply than those who were primarily 
engaged in it. But in the end they will demand 
nearly equal reward for their services, in order com- 
fortably to support their families and^o get on, and 
thus things will practically return to where they 
are now, the attempt being contrary to the funda- 
mental principle of civilization, viz : the division 
of labor." 

Co-operation in JiouseJceepzng, however, rests, 
as it seems to me, upon a far larger basis. 

Men are the natural earners and accumulators 
of the world. This is their universal function. 
Every man has to support his family, and if his 
abilities and opportunities be equal to it, he also 
tries, . by earning more than a bare support, to 
better its condition, or even to enrich it. A man 
who can buy and sell for a co-operative store so as 
to accumulate profits for its members, could do so 
also for himself and his family in a retail store of 
his own. It is no object to him, therefore, to 
manage a co-operative store on the mere pay of a 



62 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

subordinate ; while on the other hand the members, 
wishing to have their dividends as large as possible, 
try to keep him on the lowest salary they can. A 
struggle then arises from the very nature of things. 
By the very pressure which forces him for the sake 
of others to rise in life if possible, every man is 
the natural competitor of every other. Conflict is 
the natural status of them all. 

But with women it is far otherwise. They are 
not the earners, but the spenders — not the accu- 
mulators, but the distributors of society. Thus 
they are removed from the arena of strife and com- 
petition, and since the function of every modern 
woman is that of buyer for her family, her chief 
anxiety is, or should be, how to make the funds 
entrusted to her go the farthest. Now, Co-oper- 
ative Storekeeping has shown her the way, and 
the only way, to do this, for it is but another ex- 
pression for the most economical distribution pos- 
sible. Women are always full of thought and care 
about buying for themselves and their households. 
It would take but a little more thought and care 



KOCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. b6 

of the same kind of which thej are already expend- 
ing so much, to enable them to combine together 
and buy co-operatively. Women are organizing 
successful sales and fairs for churches and charities 
the whole time. It would require no more busi- 
ness talent and less ingenuity to organize a co- 
operative store than it does a fair, since the goods 
to be sold are already manufactured. 

My belief, therefore, is, that if, as Mr. Thomas 
Hughes, one of the oldest and strongest advocates 
of the Rochdale system in England, himself ad- 
mitted a few years ago, ^' there exists in the co- 
operative movement an amount of selfishness and 
greed which is perfectly disgraceful," it is simply 
because it was undertaken by the sex to whom 
in every respect it is unsuited. In the order of 
our modern world, production and accumulation are 
the functions of the house-master ; distribution and 
economy are the functions of the house-mistress. 
If the former undertake to supply his family a 
little cheaper by adding to his own trade or voca- 
tion that of keeping a co-operative store, inevitably 



64 CO-OPEEATIVE nOUSEKEEPING-. 

he will be distracted more or less from his old busi- 
ness, and will wish to make money by the new, 
and society will be no better off than it was before. 

But let the house-mistress attempt the same 
function, and she is only carrying on in a little 
wider sphere that which is already a daily duty, 
and which has become with many a daily success. 

Constantly do we meet in women — to quote the 
admirable words of Goethe— 

"■5f -X- -K- The qualities, which, when developed, make 
such women as we find in history, whose excellence 
appears to us far preferable to that of men; this clear- 
ness of view, this expertness in all emergencies, this sure- 
ness in details, which brings the whole so accurately out, 
although they never seem to think of it. . . . Where is there 
any station higher than the ordering of the house ? While 
the husband has to vex himself with outside matters ; while 
he has wealth to gather and secure ; while perhaps he takes 
part in the administration of the State, and everywhere de- 
pends on circumstances, ruling nothing, I may say, while he 
conceives that he is ruling much — a reasonable housewife is 
actually governing in the interior of her family; has the com- 
fort and satisfaction of every person in it to provide for. . . . 
What unvarying activity is needed to conduct this constantly 



ROCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. 65 

recurring series in unbroken living order! ... It is when a 
woman has attained this inward mastery that she truly makes 
the husband whom she loves a master; her attention will 
acquire all sorts of knowledge; her activity will turn them 
all to profit. Thus she is dependent upon no one, and she 
procures her husband genuine independence, that which is 
interior and domestic. Whatever he possesses, he beholds 
secured ; what he earns, well employed." 

If we so often see the above picture fully realized 
by the house-mistress, even with the disadvantage 
of buying at retail, what would it be could " good 
managers," as we term them, combine to buy at 
wholesale ? Like Goethe's heroine — 

*' It would be an easy task for them to acquire a knowledge 
of the province — nay of all the empire ; it would be but re- 
peating on the great scale what they know so accuiately on 
the small. V 

Successful co-operative storekeeping may best be 
described as " the business of supply conducted by 
the few for the good of all." Men are not accus- 
tomed to this kind of self-sacrifice, and in fact their 
duty to their families forbids it. But with women 



66 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

it is precisely the reverse. They spend their lives 
in services for which there is no fixed remuneration, 
and in return for which they get all the luxuries or 
only the necessaries of life, as the case may be. 
They are thinking and planning constantly for the 
well-being of others, and are content if they see 
that well-being accomplished without having gained 
anything material by it themselves. Therefore 
they are particularly fitted to organize co-operative 
stores, for by so doing they would not only do the 
greatest possible sum of good to their own fam- 
ilies, but also to the families of those women who 
are too poor, or too busy, or too shiftless, to organ- 
ize co-operative or wholesale buying for themselves. 
As things are now, retailers sell the goods and 
housekeepers manufacture them. Co-oj^erative 
Housekeeping, erected on the basis of the Co- 
operative Store, would enable women to purchase 
directly from the wholesalers and producers, thus 
saving to every family the retail profit its house- 
keeper has now to pay on the provisions she manu- 
factures for it. The women who must organize 



EOCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. 67 

and offi^cer co-operative housekeeping, if this he 
ever done, being already supported by their hus- 
bands and fathers iyi their oivn homes^ would not 
require such large salaries and emoluments as do 
the heads of retail estahlishments, while their em- 
ployes of the working classes would he as well paid 
and prohahly far hotter cared for, than they can be 
under the competitions of business men as at 
present carried on. The celebrated Bon Marche, 
of Paris, might then be copied by benevolent 
women in every city — and all in the direct line of 
their own housekeeping! *'^ 

The ultimate commercial results of co-operative 
housekeeping in towns and villages, would, it seems 
to me, be notably two : 

I. The large retail houses now managed by 
men would be changed into wholesale houses, and 
the smaller ones would gradually disappear — their 
owners and clerks, with their ignorance, mean- 
ness, daily lying and dishonesty — in fine, with 
every attribute of manhood wanting, being com- 

*Appendix B. 



68 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

pelled, greatly to the benefit of the species, into 
more manly occupations. The enormous areas of 
virgin soil on the earth's surface to be put under 
cultivation, and of exhausted soil to be reclaimed, 
indicate where the energies of the stronger sex, 
both physical and mental, are needed, and there- 
fore where they had better be bestowed. 

II. The profits of the household trade would be 
distributed among households in proportion to 
their consumption, and thus many of the gigantic 
fortunes which now tower over society so mena- 
cingly, would not be building up, as they daily are, 
out of the retail profits wrung from the family and 
the sewing-girl. Co-operative housekeeping, in 
fact, and without any governmental interference 
whatever, would equalize the wealth of the com- 
munity as no other agency by any possibility can. 
As no family would be allowed to pay anything 
but cash, each family would receive back a surplus 
of saving, no matter how lavish the expenditure. 

In the country, co-operative housekeeping would 
avail, I can not but hope, to relieve the farmers' 



KOCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. 69 

wives of what one of themselves has just shown us 
to be their present absolute slavery to the '* savage- 
ness of toil." 

I have said that ''in a century of dazzling intel- 
lectual light and amid the methods of Freedom and 
Civilization, women alone, of the corporate and 
industrial body, hug themselves in their old Cim- 
merian darkness, and cling stupidly and stubbornly 
to the customs of Barbarism and of Slavery." — But 
this is not altogether true, for strange and indeed 
incredible as it may seem, the most important of 
all masculine industries — Agriculture — is carried 
on by men in similar defiance of the great laws of 
the combination of capital and the division and 
organization of labor. 

Each farmer farms by himself with the assistance 
of one or more " hired men," as each house-mistress 
keeps house by herself with the assistance of one 
or more hired women, and this, though farming, 
like housekeeping, involves varied knowledge and 
many different processes, and though to carry it to 
the point of production and perfection of which it 



70 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

is capable, a like union of decided intellectual at- 
tainment and energy with simple brute force is 
necessary — a union as unlikely to be combined in 
one man merely because he is a farmer, as in one 
woman merely because she is a housekeeper. 

Farming, of course, like all other scientific pro- 
duction, should be undertaken by stock companies 
with adequate capital and with all the resources of 
chemistry, machinery, and trained and specialized 
labor. That hitherto it has not been so carried on 
to any extent, is simply due to that passion for the 
absolute owning of land which is as inherent in the 
masculine breast as is its impulse for the absolute 
owning of women. But as Mr. Henry George has 
recently shown in a remarkable book (" Progress 
and Poverty"), and as the Mosaic Law enjoined 
thirty-five hundred years ago (Lev. 25, v. 8 to 34) 
men have 710 business to *' own " absolutely that 
land which God made equally for all the successive 
generations of his children ! 

In order, therefore, to bring agriculture up to 
the highest standard of civilization and of philan- 



KOCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. 71 

thropy, and at the same time to keep the land in 
the hands of the masses of our people, the farms 
of the United States should be thrown into great 
estates of convenient size and owned in hundred 
dollar shares by the farmers in proportion to the 
lands each one contributes. Each share should 
command a vote, and no farmer should be allowed 
a vote on less than one or more than a hundred (?) 
shares — interest and dividends, but no vote, being 
allowed him on his surplus shares. By the rules 
of these companies, every laborer who would con- 
nect himself with an estate for a term of years, 
should be obliged to inhabit a cottage upon it and 
to pay a portion of his rent toward the purchase of 
as many shares as represented the value of his 
cottage. In this way, the men living by and on 
the soil would have a direct ownership and interest 
in it, and the accumulation of overgrown landed 
properties in a few hands would be prevented. 

Could co-operative housekeeping, therefore, be 
organized in cities and villages, I believe that some 
such mighty and beneficent agricultural revolution 



72 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING- 

as the foregoing might result; for when the wives 
and daughters of farmers saw the comparative ease 
and perfection of the combined housekeeping 
in towns, such would be their revolt and protest 
against the separate housekeeping of farms, that 
farmers would find it for their own interest and 
happiness to throw the lands of each half or quar- 
ter township into a common stock, and in the centre 
of the thus united properties, to build co-operative 
store-houses, kitchens and laundries wherein their 
wives and daughters could work in company, while 
their separate residences were arranged conven- 
iently as rural cottages about them. 

Men do their work — they underp^o their toil 
and drudgery — in the outside world of men, away 
from the women and the house, and they come back 
to the house and to the society of women for rest, 
quiet and comfort. *' Home" is for them the place 
of ease, refreshing and happiness. Hardly so for 
the woman. It may be her place of happiness, but 
it is also that of her labor, care, disappointment, 
and fatiffue. How often we observe husbands re- 



EOCHDALE AND ITS LESSONS. T3 

luctant to go out in the evening, and wondering 
why their wives like to do so ! It is because 
they have had so much variety and interest during 
business hours among their own sex, that when 
these hours are over, they prefer repose and pri- 
vacy with their families. But the wife has been 
shut up for • days and perhaps weeks with all her 
little worries, and it is no wonder if she is glad to 
go to an entertainment or to a neighbor's house to 
forget them. 

!N'ow since in our century girls are educated on 
the same general plan as boys, why should not 
women live on the same general plan as men — 
carry on the hard and perplexing part of 
their feminine vocation of housekeeping, together^ 
outside the house, and keep the home, the 
family circle, as the delightful place of order and 
beauty, of rest and seclusion for the wife as for the 
husband — for the daughters as for the sons ? 

For then, if women labored together at their 
housekeeping during the " burden and heat of the 
day," the toil would be not only lightened and 
sweetened by companionship, but also every woman 



74: CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEEEEl'lISG. 

could select that clepaiiment of housewifery the most 
suited to hei talent, and having that alone to attend 
to, she could have strength and time to bring it 
to the highest possible perfection; and further, the 
husband would be saved the intimate and harrassing 
knowledge of his wife's housekeeping difficulties 
which is too often the fatal friction — the sand be- 
tween the wheels — of married life that more than 
any other element destroys its fond ideal and its 
charm ! 

In short — from whatever stand-point we look at 
CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING, its potentialities as 
a great ameliorating agent of our disordered and 
suffering civilization seem to be so infinite, that the 
causes of the failure of the Cambridge Co-operative 
Housekeeping Association have, as it seems to me, an 
interest not less for the philanthropists who are 
alarmed at the accelerating speed with which the 
rich are growing richer, and the poor poorer in this 
country, than for the women who are willing to 
believe that there may be a ^' more excellent way " of 
household organization than that Avhlch the sex has 
hitherto employed. 



V. 

*^HOW NOT TO DO IT." 

The Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping 
Association of 1870-71, which numbered about 
forty shareholders, failed principally because the 
housekeepers who organized it did not strongly and 
clearly perceive the fundamental fact which I 
attempted to make plain in the beginning of the 
second chapter, namely, that primarily all modern 
housekeepers are hiiyers. — From the moment they 
enter the four bare walls of a house to make and 
keep there a home, until they close their eyes in 
their last long sleep, they must buy and buy as the 
basis of whatever they try to do. Co-operative 
huyiiig, therefore, must logically be the beginning 
— the basis — the indispensable foundation — of co- 
operative housekeeping, and the Cambridge Associa^ 
tion should first have opened a stoke and learned 



76 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPIITG. 

how to BUY, and then, when the store was on a 
thoroughly sound financial basis, the Association 
could have gone on to develop from the buying 
department of housekeeping, one manufacturing 
department of housekeeping after another, until it 
became able to supply any family within its mem- 
bership circle with any ordinary article of domestic 
consumption it might need. 

But instead of this, these inexperienced naviga- 
tors on unknown business seas thought they would 
do just as women do when they go to housekeeping 
— start all their "three trades" at once ! They 
took a house and fitted up in it a bakery, a kitchen, 
a laundry and a store, and though, with instinctive 
common sense, they planned to put these various 
departments into the hands of separate committees, 
— by the over-ruling advice of their husbands, who 
met and amended the constitution they had drawU 
up, they made their second grand mistake, and gave 
the whole in charge of a board of seven directors, 
of which one, the treasurer, was to be a paid officer 
and the manager of the whole concern I 



HOW NOT TO DO IT. 77 

The directors meant to have opened the depart- 
ments almost simultaneously, but for convenience, 
and because the shareholders cared more for it than 
for any other, they began with the laundry. It 
was supposed that it would be the easiest to man- 
age — in fact, that it would almost run itself. 
Scarcely one of the shareholders thought much 
about the store, which, as I have just shown, 
should have been the foundation of the whole 
undertaking. They did not believe in, or very 
much care for, the ten to fifteen per cent of profit 
or saving that the system, if faithfully carried out, 
offered them. They were all people of means and 
position, and they only looked upon co-operative 
housekeeping, even if successful, as a convenience. 
Its economical side did not attract them in the 
least. Still less did they look upon it as a duty to 
do all they could to make the attempt succeed. 
Most of them subscribed their money as to a charity, 
and there, for them, the matter ended. 

No sooner, however, had the Association got to 
work, than the directors found that they had in 



78 CO-OPEEATIYE HOUSEKEEPING. 

dire earnest three separate businesses on their 
hands at once. They were all house-mistresses 
themselves, and had their 'three trades' at home to 
carry on for their families at the same time, one 
of which, as we all know, demands that most of its 
processes be freshly repeated three times a day. 
Thus these unfortunate ladies could not spend 
enough time at the co-operative rooms, — or thought 
they could not — to smooth out the housekeep- 
ing tangle they had got themselves into. 

The opening of the laundry had been followed 
in quick succession by that of the bakery 
and the store. But the former was proving such 
an unexpected problem that the treasurer, who 
alone of the Association gave her time to its in- 
terests, was entirely absorbed in making both ends 
meet every week in that single department. The 
bakery was closed almost as soon as it was opened 
for the lack of some one to perform a like oifice for 
it also, and the store was confided to a paid lady 
clerk who was honest and faithful, but also as ig- 
norant of business as the directors or shareholders 



HOW NOT TO DO IT. 79 

themselves. Of the latter it soon appeared that 
only about twelve out of the whole forty, had any 
intention of giving the Association any custom 
whatever. The treasurer was by the constitution 
a paid officer, but the patronage was so small that 
there never was any surplus toward her salary. 
Her services were entirely gratuitous, and the only 
result of her being theoretically paid was that the 
other directors assisted her much less, and felt far 
less responsibility than they otherwise would have 
done. After the first few wrecks they became ter- 
ribly discouraged and mortified, and rarely went 
near the co-operative rooms, business meetings 
being called by the treasurer in vain. 

Thus there was no practical co-operation what- 
ever on the part either of the subscribing housekeep- 
ers to sustain their Association by their patronage, or 
of the executive ones to carry it on by their labor. 
As some one wittily remarked ; '* If the house- 
keepers of Cambridge will not co-operate, how can 
^Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping' succeed?" 
The treasurer spent her entire time in the laundry 



80 CO-OPEEATIYE HOUSEKEEPING. 

for half a year, excepting the two afternoons a 
week in which she did the buying for the little 
store. At the end of that time she was obliged to 
leave Cambridge for some months. Before going, 
she told the directors that if they would each spend 
one day in the week to oversee the laundry-women, 
the laundry would continue to pay expenses, but 
not otherwise, as the business was too small 
to support a paid superintendent. As the work 
of the laundry had been highly satisfactory to the 
twelve or fourteen shareholders who had patronized 
it, both as to price and quality, the directors were 
unwilling to close the department. But they could 
not believe their treasurer. They thought that 
some working-class woman who had to support her- 
self, instead of a lady supported by her husband 
as was the treasurer, would make more out of the 
laundry from mere self-interest than the latter had 
done, and after her departure they tried one paid 
superintendent after another, only to lose money 
by all of them. 
Just as the first year of the experiment was up, 



HOW NOT TO DO IT. 81 

(April, 1871), the treasurer returned. She had 
been in England, and had had some opportunity to 
investigate co-operation in its native home. She 
was full of hope and courage and urged the Asso- 
ciation in the light of her new information and of 
their own past mistakes, to re-organize and begin 
all over again on the true basis of the co-operative 
store. But they were too thoroughly disheartened 
and dejected to wish to have anything more to do 
with ' Co-operative Housekeeping.* They voted 
to disband, gave up the house, sold off the fixtures 
and remaining groceries, divided the proceeds 
among themselves in proportion to their subscrip- 
tions—and there the problem remains until this day ! 
For her part, the treasurer has never since been 
an advocate of, or taken active part in, any so- 
called " charitable " associations, for she says that 
the co-operative laundry taught her that the only 
way for women to do the poor any real good is to 
employ them ^give them work, and teach them to 
do it well. As an instance, one poor, old, half- 
starved woman, who was not skillful enough to work 



82 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPINa 

in families, earned a weekly pittance there at rougli 
washing that made her exclaim regretfully, after 
the association was given up, " While that laundry 
was goin, I was in heaven !" And, in truth, an 
industrial organization is like a paper-mill. It 
can work in the rags and tags of humanity that 
must otherwise become outcasts and paupers, be- 
cause their feeble brains and wills can only feebly 
do one thing. Co-operative Housekeeping Asso- 
ciations, among whose officers would be found 
many a pitying Christian woman, would solve, and 
they alone can solve, a problem at once one of the 
most imperative and most hopeless of contemporary 
philanthropy. — " A civilization is possible," says 
Henry George, in a late number of FranJc Leslie s 
illustrated paper, " in which the poorest could 
have all the comforts and conveniences now en- 
joyed by the rich, in which prisons and alms- 
houses would be needless, and charitable societies 
untJiought of.'" Yes, such a civilization is possi- 
ble, but not unless one-half the human race — the 



now NOT TO DO IT. b3 

feminine half — comes under the laiv of civilization , 

viz. — ORGANIZATION ! 

So much for ''how not to do" Co-operative 
Housekeeping! — Bat let us not too loftily despise 
tliis Cambridge failure. Rarely, indeed almost 
never, is it given to mortals to do rightly any un- 
tried thing the first time. Every one must have 
noticed this in himself in the simplest attempts. 
During a period of twenty years, co-operative or 
" union" stores, as they were at first called, were 
tried again and again by artisans in England, and 
tried only to fail, until, in 1842, the Rochdale ar- 
tizans grasped intellectually all the conditions of 
of the problem, and at last made a success. In- 
ventors almost never go to work at first in the 
right way to achieve their desired results, nor did 
our Cambridge housekeepers. They made perhaps 
every mistake, great and small, that could have 
been made in such an undertaking. But for that 
very reason their experience is invaluable, and, 
taken in connection Avith the success of the Roch- 
dale pioneers and their numerous imitators, will 



84: CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

prove, as I believe, a safe and perfect chart into 
the haven of Co-operative Housekeeping whenever 
the brilliant Housekeeper of the Future shall 
make up her mind to weigh her mediaeval anchor 
and spread her now unused canvas to the cheerful 
breezes of Progress and of Hope ! 



VI. 

HOW TO DO IT. 

Let us suppose that from her deep and serious 
conviction on the subject, the Housekeeper of the 
Future does some day make up her mind conscien- 
tiously to attempt Co-operative Housekeeping. 
How shall she proceed ? 

Let a preliminary committee of not fewer than 
thirteen intelligent and resolute women or young 
ladies — it matters not which, but the latter, for 
reasons to be hereafter stated, would be preferable — 
first pledge themselves to stand by each other andt 
their cause through everything, and then issue a 
capital stock of not less than two hundred and fifty 
shares at $5.00 a share, in what had better be 
called simply a "Housekeeping Association " — each 
member to own not less than one, or more than 
five shares, and each share to command one vote. - 



86 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPINa. 

When tlie shares are all subscribed for, the 
shareholders should draw up and print their rules 
and elect the usual officers, together with an ex- 
ecutive committee of not less than twelve directors, 
the officers, of course^ to be ex officio members of 
this committee. The shares should then be paid 
up, and when this is completely done, and not be- 
fore, the directors may rent a room in a convenient, 
but not expensive locality, putting in the very cheap- 
est possible fittings, such as unpainted shelves, 
and a long unpainted pine table for a counter. 
Keserving one quarter's rent, with the balance 
of the $1,250.00, let them start a Co-operative 
Grocery, beginning with a complete stock of goods 
if they have money enough, and if not, leaving out 
srt first the four articles which are expensive to buy, 
inconvenient to handle, and on which, though the 
consumption is large, the profit is small — viz.: 
flour, sugar, molasses, and kerosene. 

Poor women who wish to become members, but 
who can not affiard to purchase a share, should be 
permitted to be customers of this store until the 



HOW TO DO IT. 87 

proportion of their profits equals the price of a 
share, after which they must be enrolled precisely 
on the basis of all the other members. Artisans 
in Rochdale are living now in their old age upon 
the savings the " Store " has made for them, with- 
out their ever having paid in an original penny 
toward its capital. They began buying there, and 
that was all ! — How can a greater blessing to the 
poor than such a store be imagined or expressed ? 

Employes of the Association for one or more 
years must in all cases agree to be customers of 
the Association and to become shareholders to the 
full number of five shares, a small per cent of 
their wages being reserved for the purchase of their 
shares until they are all paid for. — The ultimate 
working of this rule in assisting the poor to become 
capitalists in a small way, and therefore in bridg- 
ing the now ever-widening chasm between the 
moneyed and the working-classes can not be over- 
estimated. 

Members who desire to leave the Association 



88 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEE.EEFIKG. 

must find a responsible purchaser for their shares 
before their resignation can be accepted. 

If sales are restricted to members, the store need 
be open but two mornings of each week.* The 
directors must purchase none but one grade, i. e., 
the hestj of everything. They must buy and sell 
strictly and only for cash. They must sell at 
the current retail rates^ and divide the profits 
among the members in proportion to their pur- 
chases. They must pay their book-keeper, (the 
book-keeper must be paid ! ) and also their porter, 
but at first, no one else, for the buying for and the 
clerkage of the store must all be voluntary labor on 
the part of the directors and shareholders until the 
enterprise is on a sound paying basis. If they 
send for orders and deliver goods, they must 
make separate charges for these items. The co- 
operative stores in England never furnish either 
free. 

No ofiicer or director must purchase the smallest 
thing or make any contract for the store whatever 

* At first the Rochdale Pioneers kept theirs open but two 
evenings in each week. See Appendix C for Rules, etc. 



HOW TO DO IT. 89 

upon her own responsibility. Far less must the 
directors appoint a " manager" to do the buying 
and conduct the store. The buying must be done 
after consultation in executive committee, by a 
member or members of that committee, and the ex- 
ecutive committee as a whole must be responsible 
to the shareholders for all expenditures. The re- 
verse policy has resulted disastrously in hundreds 
of co-operative stores. All the original " union " 
stores were conducted by paid "managers," and 
they all failed. To conduct co-operative stores by 
executive committees of which the members are 
all equally responsible, was one of the great dis- 
coveries of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers. It 
was overlooked by the Cambridge co-operative 
housekeepers, for their sole responsible officer was 
their treasurer. — Miss Kate Field's Co-operative 
Dressmaking Association overlooked it, for that 
was managed by Miss Field herself and one or two 
highly-paid assistants. 

The despatch announcing the suspension of this 
concern, said that " Miss Field overshadowed her 



90 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

associates." That accounted for everything. "Co- 
operation" means not only co-operation in money ; 
it insists on co-operation in labour and in sug- 
gestion as well. "In the multitude of counsellors 
is strength " is one of its prime principles. If 
Miss Field, instead of being the responsible salaried 
manager of her association, had been one of an 
unpaid managing committee of twelve New York 
ladies, with their characteristic executive faculty 
and American " know-how," as Hawthorne calls it, 
the attempt would probably have been a brilliant 
success. 

It can not therefore be too strongly impressed 
upon the reader that if an executive committee of 
matrons or girls, all pledged to be earnest, act- 
ive, and self-sacrificing in promoting the success of 
the undertaking, can not be secured for any pro- 
posed Co-operative Housekeeping Association, it 
would he hopeless to make the attempt at all! 

The store must not keep account of the sales to 
members, as that involves as much book-keeping 
and therefore expense, as the credit system; but at 



HOW TO DO IT. 91 

each purchase a metal o?- other ticket, with a face 
value corresponding to the amount of the purchase 
money, must he given to the purchaser, and these 
tickets she must herself keep, and at stated inter- 
vals return to the store as evidence to be then and 
there recorded on her own page of the amount of 
her purchases.* At the end of every quarter the 
accountant must add up the whole amount of these 
tickets, and in case the store has made anything 
over expenses and the interest on its shares, a 
dividend must be paid or credited to her in pro- 
portion to her purchases. 

Finally, monthly meetings of the whole Associa- 
tion must be held, before which the directors must 
lay the exact state of the business, and ask for in- 
structions on important decisions. 

When the profits begin to come in, the members 
-should not draw them out, but should lend them to 

* The Rochdale and most other co-operative stores in 
England have each their own tin and brass currency of the 
same denominational value as the silver and gold coin in 
common use, and with these the members keep their own 
accounts as above. 



92 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

the Association without interest until the store is 
thoroughly stocked, and until there is also a suffi- 
cient surplus to rent some adjoining room and fit 
it up as a Bakery. This bakery must have its 
own committee of management, and its committee 
must be ex officio a part of, and report to, and con- 
sult with the original executive committee, and 
through it with the Association itself. !N"or should 
the Association attempt any other housekeeping 
department until the bakery is a success, both 
financially, and as regards the bread, pastry, des- 
serts and preserves that it turns out. 

After the bakery has been mastered, the Asso- 
ciation should empower the bakery committee to 
proceed in the same way from theprofitsof the two 
departments now established, to open a meat, soup, 
and vegetable Kitchen. With the splendid lady 
cooks now before the public as teachers and lec- 
turers on cookery, it would be so easy a matter for 
the bakery and kitchen committee to consult with 
and learn from such experts, how to organize their 
departments for the supply of meals, or parts of 



HOW TO DO IT. 93 

meals, to the families composing the Association, 
that space need not here be devoted to suggestions 
on the subject. 

The most important department of co-operative 
housekeeping, the gastronomical, being now organ- 
ized and in smooth working order — and the Asso- 
ciation should at the outset allow itself not less 
than three years for the accomplishment of this 
division of its work, — the same process could be 
repeated for the sewing needs and interests of the 
housekeeping circle, by first stocking a small Dry- 
Goods Store with the staples in textile fabrics and 
in sewing materials that are in constant demand in 
•every family, and from this gradually developing 
the underclothing and dressmaking, the cloak and 
millinery rooms, of which dry -goods are the neces- 
sary foundation. Last of all, the members may 
organize a Co-operative Laundry, and then the whole 
housekeeping enterprise would be complete. 

I place the laundry the last on the list, because 
as laundering is now, in independent housekeeping, 
the bugbear of the week, and the most unmanage- 



9tt CO-OPERATIVE PIOUSEKEEPING. 

able element of household work, so it will be found 
in the beginning the most difficult, because the 
hardest and most repulsive industry of co-operative 
housekeeping, though, once mastered and system- 
atized, it will prove the easiest, because the least 
varied, to keep perfectly running. 

A steam laundry should not at first be thought 
of, as steam-machinery costs so much, and women 
are so little used to managing things on a scale 
requiring machinery. A very large " wash " can 
be done with the ordinary conveniences, and 
after the laundry committee have learned the 
business of laundering, it will be time enough to 
go into " labor-saving " appliances. From the 
receiving and marking room,* the washing, boiling, 
and starching room, the hanging and drying room, 
the sprinkling and folding room, the ironing rooms, 
up to the final sorting room, rigid superintendence 
in every one is absolutely necessary in order to 

*£very piece that comes into a laundry has to be marked 
"where it will not show," with the number of the family or 
person sending it, before it goes to the tubs. 



HOW TO DO IT. 95 

keep the laundresses from wasting their time ! 
This superintendence, or oversight, or " bossing 
— call it what you will — must at first be done in 
turn, without compensation, by the members of the 
laundry committee and their substitutes, just as in 
charitable associations ladies take turns by the 
week or the month, in being the " visitor " of the 
hospital or the asylum which they sustain. If this 
unpaid superintendence can not be secured be- 
forehand — to open a co-operative laundry will 
only result in a failure like those of the co-operative 
laundries attempted in 1870, not only by ladies in 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, but also in Winchester 
and Springfield of the same State.'^ Women of the 
laundress class will not earn their day's wages with- 
out oversight when they are working together in 
numbers, as in a laundry, and it is the wages item 
that counts up in laundry expenses. The treasurer 
of the Cambridge co-operative laundry made both 

*Tlie two latter, by the way, began with steam machinery, 
and their collapse was far more speedy and ruinous than that 
of the Cambridge laundry. 



96 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

ends meet for six months solely by her unremitting 
superintendence during that period, and if she 
could have been in every room at once instead of 
chiefly in one or two, the work could have been 
done for one-fourth less, i. e. for thirty-eight 
instead of fifty cents a dozen, where everything 
was sent. As soon as her superintendence was 
withdrawn, the department lost money every week, 
until it was obliged to close.* 

A last but indispensable element of co-operative 
success remains to be touched upon, though it is 
implied in the very word itself. Without leaves a 
tree can not live, though its roots and stem may be 
perfect. And so in a co-operative society. Its rules 
may be wisdom itself; its executive committee the 
most competent and devoted of men or women; but 
if the members do not give it their custom with 
precisely the fidelity with which housekeepers pa- 
tronize each her favorite grocer or provisioner or 
dry-goods merchant, the association can not live. 
If the quality or quantity of an article be unsatisfac- 
tory, let the dissatisfied member complain to the 

* Appendix D. 



HOW TO DO IT. 97 

executive committee, and if redress be not granted, 
let her complain at the monthly meeting of the 
whole Association ; but let her not give her own 
store — the store in which she is a shareholder, and 
which self-sacrificing women are trying so hard to 
make a success — the go-by. This was the sad, 
unmerited fate of the Cambridge Co-operative 
Housekeeping Association. The members knew 
that it had a laundry and a store in active opera- 
tion, yet three-fourths of them quietly went on pat- 
ronizing the regular dealers, some of them even 
being so childish as to say that they did not like 
to " hurt the feelings " of the two leading candi- 
dates for their favor, by setting up an "opposition !" 
— Their ex-treasurer smiled a grim smile when, a 
year or two later, she counted, within a radius of 
a quarter of a mile of these petted firms, four 
more groceries (making six instead of two retail 
drains npon the Cambridge public), — which 
could not have begun business had the Cam- 
bridge housekeepers had the intelligence and self- 
respect to nphold their own undertaking. ISTay, 



98 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

one of the new stores was created by the bitter 
quarrel and separation of the oldest of the favor- 
ite firms into two, and another was started by a 
seceding clerk of its rival ! Meantime, Cambridge 
continues to be noted for its " expensiveness/* 

In the foregoing resume is believed to be com- 
prised all the fundamental co-operative principles 
and methods which ensured the success of the 
Rochdale Pioneers and of the thirteen hundred or 
more Co-operative Associations that are successfully 
imitating them — Let me for the last time insist, 
from the disastrous Cambridge experience, upon 
the regulation requiring each department of any 
Housekeeping Association to have its own direc- 
tors (who, however, are of course also ex officio 
members of the general executive committee) — and 
also, that in any such attempt, all the labor in 
the store, except that of the book-keeper and the 
porter, must in the beginning be voluntary. The 
latter is, in fact, a cardinal point in the success of 
co-operative undertakings ; the reason being, that 
in the starting of the enterprise every device must 



HOW TO DO IT. 99 

be employed to keep down expenses and to increase 
profits until the business is learned. Officers will 
inevitably make mistakes and bad bargains at first, 
from inexperience. Such an Association will have, 
of course, unforeseen difficulties to struggle against, 
and the only safety is to give in the beginning as 
much voluntary labor as possible. The book- 
keeper only must be paid, because, as the Rochdale 
pioneers found to their cost, book-keeping is at 
once too exacting and too important a function to 
be trusted to any but paid labor. The salaries of 
the officers must be the rcAvard of their success ! 

To all this the objection is always made ; — " Then 
all the care and responsibility will fall upon the 
few. The many will profit, and two or three de- 
voted ones will bear the brunt." 

But not necessarily unrewarded, — because if the 
members of a successfully organized Co-operative 
Housekeeping Association have any ordinary sense 
of gratitude, their first care, when the enterprise 
is found to be self-sustaining, and before they draw 
out any of their own profits, will be to vote an 



100 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

adequate pecuniary recognition to the devoted 
women whose gratuitous services from the time of 
its inception made the experiment possible. . 

Even, however, if these oflScers received nothing 
but a bare " vote of thanks " for their long strain 
of anxiety and labor, such would be the vast and 
incalculable result of the success of a single Co- 
operative Housekeeping Association, that the hope 
of that success alone should be a sufficient stimulus 
and reward to any women attempting it. Women 
should remember that all the greatest and most 
beneficent revolutions and discoveries of this world 
have been free gifts to mankind from the noble and 
devoted natures who advocated them. Jesus Christ 
and His Apostles had no money for preaching 
the gospel amid every privation and dying in 
tortures. Martin Luther got a simple clergyman's 
living out of the most gigantic struggle that a mere 
mortal ever entered into against the powers of evil 
that were trampling down humanity. George 
"Washington had no salary beyond his actual 
expenses for first carrying his country through the 



HOW TO DO IT. 101 

1 evolutionary war and afterward placing her in 
fore-front of civilized nations ; and the Kochdale 
Pioneers, whom I am so anxious that American 
housekeepers should imitate — poor, underpaid, 
overworked artisans as they were, gave their 
services, and some of them sacrificed health and 
life in their strenuous efforts to ensure the success 
of the experiment which has opened such boundless 
vistas of comfort, prosperity and elevation not 
only to their own class, but, if women would only 
do their duty in imitating them, to their whole 
race. 

Can not educated and intelligent women in the 
generous enjoyment of all the comforts and many 
of the luxuries of life, go and do likewise ? — for 
this is for them by far the most serious question of 
the time. Is it possible that they can help doing 
likewise when once they comprehend how relent- 
lessly the ponderous wheels of the mighty modern 
civilization amid which they are but superfluous 
though charming spectators, are grinding feminine 
honor and happiness to powder, simply because 



102 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

they do not ? — It has long been the theory that 
women are incapable of organizing and working 
among themselves, and this alleged incapacity has 
been given as the reason why throughout the 
history of the other sex they have appeared as 
unorganized units or life-cells merely. 

" The man^' says Michelet, " no matter lioio 
feeble he may be morally^ is none the less on a road 
of ideas, of inventions and of discoveries so rapid 
that the sparks fiy from the burning rails. The 
woman, left fatally behind, remains on the 
threshold of a past which she hardly knows herself. 
She is distanced, for our misfortune, but she will 
not, or she cannot go faster." — Will she not? Can 
she not ? In truth, nothing is so astonishing to 
the student of the woman-question of to-day as 
the sudden out-burst of organizing and combining 
impulse that is thrilling through the feminine hosts 
of this land ! 

To show what this impulse has done and is doing 
on the grand scale, it is sufficient to remind the 
reader of the intensely in-earnest and actively 



HOW TO DO IT. 1(33 

influential Women's Temperance Associations of 
the country, of the Women's Anti-Slavery So- 
cieties before, and of their Sanitary and Relief 
Commissions during the Civil War, of the Woman 
Suifrage movement which now numbers its more 
than thirty years, of the Association for the 
Advancement of Women, which is in its tenth year, 
and of the Women's Centennial Association of 
1876— all of which have, or did have, workers and 
representatives and adherents, more or less, in 
every State and community in the Union, and the 
last of which has proved the parent of so many 
vigorous "Decorative" offspring. Indeed, the 
number of lesser women's associations, societies 
and clubs of every description that are springing 
up in every direction— from cooking and walking 
clubs up to scientific and artistic ones, and from 
simple sewing-circles for the poor up to organic 
action in concert with State and city authori- 
ties, is bewildering, while— older and more uni- 
versal than them all, are the parish sewing 
circles and Sunday schools, and the Women's 



JO J. CO-OFEKATIYE HOUSEKEEPING. 

National Home and Foreign Missionary Associa- 
tions of every Protestant denomination, through 
which the Christian Church, attacked and ridiculed, 
bombarded and undermined as she is by savans 
and would-be-originals from every quarter, is 
still serenely and triumphantly sustained and 
builded aloft ever higher and higher by the 
loving, unfaltering women's hands which are never 
weary of working to enlarge her and her borders ! 

I say that the spectacle of the organizing fever 
which has seized so powerfully hold of women, and 
principally within the last ten years, shows that 
the combining and co-operating faculty has been 
theirs all along, and that circumstances only have 
kept it dormant. In truth, it is but the natural 
result of the common-school system as extended by 
American men to girls, and entrusted mostly to 
women teachers, which is causing this wonderful 
flowering-out of the feminine energies and aspira- 
tions, and which was inaugurated in Boston for the 
whole country less than three generations ago.* 

*Appendix E. 



HOW TO DO IT. 105 

Never in the history of the race until this century 
have the mothers of a nation been generally en- 
lightened by education, and I think we need seek 
no other cause for that brilliancy, invention and 
energy of American men which are astonishing the 
world, and for these beginnings of effort in every 
field of thought and action on the part of women 
which are almost alarming it. 

Yes — it was the want of that intelligence which 
comes alone from the liberal education that queru- 
lous mediaevalists like Mr. Elliott and Dr. Dix 
would fain deny to women, that has so long kept 
them from the discovery that their strength, like 
that of men, lies in union, and that their weak- 
ness and consequently, any WTongs that as a class 
they may suffer, result simply from this state of 
disintegration, of absolute practical separation from 
each other in which they have been living ever since 
not they, but their " lords and masters" began to 
have a history. 



VII. 

THE OBSTACLE TO CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

The strong but strictly true old-fashioned 
phrase in the last two lines of the last chapter, 
brings me to the final consideration and suggestion 
that I have to offer upon my subject, viz. : Now 
that the discovery is made that the Lack of Union 
and Organization among Themselves is the one and 
only source of all the remediable difficulties of 
women, is there no practical obstacle but their own 
wills and inclinations in the way of this most im- 
portant and indeed fundamental union of all to 
which I w^ould urge them — the Union of House- 
keeping Interests ? 

I regret to believe that there is a "lion in the 
path," and a very real one — and he is nothing less 
than that husband-power which is very apt to shut 
down like an invisible bell-glass over every woman 



THE LION IN THE PATH. 107 

SO soon as she is married, and affectionately say to 
her, " My dear, thus far shalt thou go and no 
farther." 

In proof of this difficulty, I ^vill simply illustrate 
from the Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping 
experience. 

A Co-operative Housekeeping Association is not 
like a charitable, or a literary, or a musical, or a 
suffrage association, where the attendance on the 
part of members and officers is almost voluntary 
and often not especially necessary. It is simply 
and purely a business partnership, and its demands 
upon the part of those who are carrying -it on and 
patronizing it are as imperative as are those of any 
business of supply and demand in the world. — On 
the other hand, married women have their house- 
keeping, they have their friends, they have their 
husbands and they have their children to attend to, 
and to be at the co-operative rooms at just such a 
day and hour of every week and stay there just so 
long, regardless of everything at home, is with 
many married women an impossibility. 



108 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

For in return for her support a man expects his 
wife to keep his house. That is, for his comfort 
and well-being there are three trades to be carried 
on there, and he naturally wants this done without 
imperfections or interruptions. Moreover, many 
husbands wish their wives to be at their beck and 
call at any moment. — The wife of a very distin- 
guished Cambridge abolitionist indeed, who raised 
himself to fame and national honor by his brilliant 
poetical satires and invectives against southern 
slavery and slave-owners, but who was also very 
particular about his dinner, was asked to join the 
Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping Association. 

"What ! " exclaimed this apostle of freedom for 
negroes, " my wife 'co-operate' to make other men 
comfortable PJN'o indeed! " — Now was not that the 
crack of the slave-driver's whip, though the master 
this time was not a southern planter, nor the slave 
a colored brother ? 

After the Association had been at work for a 
few weeks, the president had to resign because the 
lady directors called at her house for conference 



THE LION IN THE PATH. 109 

oftener than suited her husband, and once kept 
him waiting for a button to be sewed on. Another 
husband would not let his wife be president because 
he said if the Association failed it might ^' injure his 
position." A third allowed his wife to join the 
undertaking and pay her subscription on condition 
that she should never go to any of the meetings. 
One young man convinced his widowed mother 
that everything was being mismanaged, and made 
her a continual '' thorn in the side " of the directors 
of the Association from the beginning to the end of 
its existence. It is true that a few men sustained 
the attempt most loyally, but most of the husbands 
laughed good-naturedly at the whole thing, proph- 
esied its failure, and put their wives out of heart 
and out of conceit with it from the beginning, while 
the husband of the chief promoter and responsible 
officer of the whole undertaking, the treasurer, 
kept writing to her so continually from Europe to 
come over and join him, that at last she felt forced 
to go and leave the Association to get on without 
her as best it might ! When she returned, and a 



110 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

final meeting of the co-operative housekeepers and 
their husbands was held to decide whether the 
experiment should be continued another year, a 
gentleman whose wife was not an active member, 
nor even a patron of the Association, but merely a 
subscriber, went to that meeting, as he afterward 
told the writer with evident satisfaction, determined 
that the attempt should end then and there — 
and it did. 

Now what men could keep up hope and courage 
in a new and difficult enterprise, if their wives were 
continually laughing or scolding at or interrupting 
it, particularly if these same wives were the money- 
power of their families, and could give or withhold 
capital to it as they chose ? — Yet such were the 
intimate adverse influences against which the poor 
little Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping Asso- 
ciation had to struggle ! 

Since, then, to keep house on the present system 
and organize housekeeping on the new system 
simultaneously (as of course would have to be the 
case until the transition from the old to the new 



THE LION IN THE PATH. Ill 

were completed — ) would seem to be more than most 
married women are able to undertake — our kst 
inquiry is, w^liether there is indeed nothing for it 
but to let the tremendous forces of American 
civilization continue to empty us all into its iron 
hopper, there to be slowly transformed in mul- 
titudes from the domestic uses of womanhood, and 
to come out at the other end — as Mr. Elliott shows 
that whole classes of women have done in the 
old-world civilizations — not women, but minis- 
trants to vice, but field hands, mill hands, mining 
hands, nail-makers, railroad diggers, street cleaners 
— in fine, whatever is most repulsive and degrad- 
ing ; or is there not, after all, some element in the 
family itself that we can use for its best and 
highest interests, without disturbing or distressing 
its present comfort ? 

For myself, and it is the final conclusion I ex- 
pect to come to on a subject to which I have given 
the best and most anxious thoui2jht of which I am 
capable, I could find this element in the unmarried 
women and girls of our every educated circle be- 



112 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

tvveen the ages of sixteen and twenty-five alone. 

Consider the army of servant girls, shop girls, 
seamstress and milliner girls, of girl teachers and 
girl book-keepers of thisland,-brave and industrious 
and skilful young creatures who earn their honest 
living with their earnest toil, — and let us ask why 
the young ladies in what we call " society," should 
not make corresponding efforts to be self-supporting, 
and to give back an equivalent for all that is done 
for them and for all that they enjoy ? 

If extremely ignorant and overworked English arti- 
sans who toiled twelve liours a day could open a store 
and make a success of it for the benefit of their fam- 
ilies, can we suppose that twenty-five or fifty bright 
American girls between eighteen and twenty-five, 
and with their whole time at their disposal, can not 
do as much ? I^ay, I believe that the teachers 
of any good-sized Sunday school in the country, 
could organize a co-operative store which should be 
a success from the first month of its existence, and 
certainly, the members of the young ladies' *' cook- 
ing clubs," which are becoming the fashion, could 
do it beyond a peradventure I 



VIII. 

THE WASTE OF THE *' GIRL OF THE PERIOD," AND 
HOW TO UTILIZE HER. 

Of all the reckless wastes of society, tlie one that 
for years has appealed to me the most, is the waste 
it makes of its educated young girls. They have 
health, they have strength, they have hope, they 
have spirit, they have vigor and elasticity and 
freshness of mind, they have freedom — they have 
everything, in fine, which the faded and disappointed 
matron of forty too generally lacks, and they have 
it from four to six and even eight and ten untram- 
melled years. And what do we encourage them to 
do with these sparkling gifts — these priceless years ? 
Principally, to sit at home and partly make (for the 
'professional girls cut and make all the hard part of 
their wardrobes) their own clothes ! — a disposition 



114 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

of them not more irrational than would it be to 
send their brothers through college and then set 
them down to help their tailors ! 

Even when young ladies try to do a little good, 
their efforts are as ludicrous in their inadequacy 
as they are pathetic in their limitations. — A friend 
of the writer belongs to a rich congregation which 
recently made a successful effort to pay off a debt 
of thirty-five thousand dollars that had long ham- 
pered its energies. The "swell girls" of the 
parish, full of sympathy with the cause, made 
cake, and the richest of them all drove round in 
her pony phaeton to sell it. They realized about 
a hundred and seventy-five dollars, and felt very 
virtuous and very successful ! That is to say — 
after an education costing thousands of dollars, and 
amid surroundings worth tens of thousands, a dozen 
clever girls could only earn the above paltry sum 
for an object that was dear to them, though their 
men friends, married and single, were giving from 
twenty-five to a thousand dollars each to it ! 

The Bishop of Manchester in an address at a 



THE MISSING LINK. 115 

public meeting read the following letter from a 
young lady which shows how the young women of 
the upper classes in England literally " kill" their 
time — nor are American girls of the same classes 
much better : — 

"We breakfast about ten. BreaMist occupies tlie best 
part of an liour, during wliicli we read our letters and pick 
up tlie latest news in the papers. After that we have to go 
and answer our letters, and my mother expects me to write 
her notes of invitation or to reply to such. Then I have to 
go into the conservatory and feed the canaries and parrots, 
and cut off the dead leaves and faded flowers from the 
plants. Then it is time to dress for lunch, and at two o'clock 
we lunch. At three my mother likes me to go with her when 
she makes her calls, and we then come home to a five o'clock 
tea, when some friends drop in. After that we get ready to 
take our drive in the park, and then we go home to dinner, 
and after dinner we go to the theatre or the opera, and then 
when we get home I am so dreadfully tired that I don't 
know what to do." 

Now what is a life like this but the most abso- 
lute loafing — and is it not a shame and a scandal that 
while as a rule the sons of an American gentleman 
spend their days in their stores and offices at their 



116 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

respective employments from eight until six o'clock, 
his daughters dawdle about at home or in the 
streets in such aimless, valueless occupations as the 
above? Such idle human beings would be obstruc- 
tive barnacles on our eager civilization even if they 
were penniless paupers — but when they demand 
and receive besides, all the luxuries of life, they 
become positive parasites, — active consumers of its 
vitality — a deadly disease in its blood! In ask- 
ing one of these girls to marry him, let her be as 
lovely as she may, in case she have no fortune, a 
young man must feel perfectly sure beforehand 
that he is hanging round his neck a weight nearly 
as heavy as he is himself, which he will have to 
carry for the rest of his life, and it is no wonder if 
the weak and the selfish among unmarried men 
think — " Rather than such a life-long burden I will 
have my club for comfort and a mistress for 
passion and put marriage out of my thoughts 
entirely.'* 

Now though I protest against the unworthy and 
pusillanimous manhood that suffers itself for any 



THE MISSING LINK. IIT 

cause to be thus treacherous to womanhood and the 
family, I protest equally against the -svaste talent 
and energy and youth of American girlhood that 
give such manhood its only excuse for being. 
I rebel against making this richly endowed 
girlhood play only the part of a " missing link." 
Educated girls, or "young ladies" as they are 
called par excellence, should go every morning to 
their business of earning their daily bread as reg- 
ularly as do the educated young gentlemen, their 
brothers, and I know that nine out of ten of these 
girls, on leaving school and college, would gladly 
go thus to their daily work if there were any work 
provided appropriate for them to do. 

Sewing excepted, every domestic occupation that 
a lady or a young girl can turn to in herown house 
is practically "dirty work," and every one must be 
done standing nearly all the while. In cooking 
the hands have to be washed incessantly, as every 
stage of every process soils them. Cooking and 
ironing have to be done over a hot fire, winter and 
summer. Bed-making, sweeping and dusting, dish 



118 CO-OPEEATIYE HOUSEKEEPING. 

and kettle, window and floor and clothes washing, 
and silver and brass • cleaning, are all occupations 
which make the skin and clothes dusty or greasy, and 
which soil, enlarge, redden and roughen the hands, 
— and yet, these are all the processes of housekeep- 
ing there are ! 

Mr. Elliott reproaches women by saying that 
to-day " no queen works, no chieftain's wife works, 
no trader's wife works, no lady works, or wishes to 
work, or expects to work," and that most women 
look upon the destruction of women's household 
occupations " with complacency " and consider that 
" having nothing to do must be a blessing." 

If by " work " Mr. Elliott only means menial 
labor such as the above, the reproach is just ; but 
in that case it applies as much, nay, far more, to his 
sex than it does to ours. No king works, 
no chieftain works, no trader works, no gen- 
tleman works, "or wishes to work or expects to 
work " ^. e. like a workman, ivith his hands, as 
Mr. Elliott desires ladies to be glad and grateful 
to do ! Not only so, gentlemen do not wish to see 



THE MISSING LINK. 119 

the hands of their lady-wives hard and red and 
rough with manual labor, or to find them when 
they come home at night as tired and indifferent to 
their appearance as servant girls, because they have 
been on their feet and lifting dishes and kettles, flat- 
irons and stove-lids all day. Educated woman is 
essentially a fastidious and dainty creature, and the 
more culture she has, the more these qualities, as a 
rule, are intensified. Her father, brother and hus- 
band do no soiling manual labor. As their compan- 
ion, what appropriateness then is there in her doing 
it? And since that is the only " work " the domestic 
circle offers her, is it any wonder that it is not only 
not attractive, but so positively repellant to her, 
that she avoids it as much as possible, and considers 
not having it to do a " blessing? " * 

But if in his definition of " work " Mr. Elliott in- 
cludes the brain-work that organizes manufactures 
and commerce, that carries on the learned profes- 
sions, and that develops science and the arts, then 
his remark about Women vs. Work is a pure slander 

*Appendix F. 



120 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

of the largest dimensions, for work of this kind the 
modern " lady" would only too thankfully partici- 
pate in, if there were only any feminine way in 
which she could do so. Co-operative Housekeep- 
ing I believe to bo such a way, and the only such 
way, and if housekeeping were organized on co- 
operative principles, not only every working girl, 
but every educated girl, every ''lady " would find 
therein her own niche which she would enjoy to fill 
daily and effectively, just as surely as all the ed- 
ucated young men who make an effort to do so, 
find sooner or later their places in the great worlds 
of commerce, of agriculture, or of the professions. 

Since, then, a great housekeeping revolution is 
necessitated by the Spirit of the Age in which the 
housekeepers of the present live, which yet their 
family complications almost forbid them to attempt, 
I say that they ought to devolve it upon the buoy- 
ant young shoulders of the Housekeepers of the 
Future! — If mothers cannot devise a better way for 
themselves, let them at least find one for their 
daughters. Let any circle of them call together 



THE MISSING LINK. 121 

one hundred girls and give them from five to twenty- 
five dollars each wherewith to start a co-operative 
store. Let them also give these American "Equit- 
able Pioneers" all the rules and experience of the 
Eochdale Equitable Pioneers, and let them consti- 
tute themselves an Advisory Committee of Matrons 
that may be consulted in any difficulty. Let the 
girls then elect their executive committee and 
adopt their rules, and when their store is opened, 
let them buy there for their own families and for 
those of the poor women whose children they 
teach in Sunday school, making such women mem- 
bers of the store as soon as the proportion of profits 
on their purchases equals the price of a share. 
When the store is on a paying basis, let them open 
in connection with it either a co-operative kitchen 
or a cooking-school which may not only train them- 
selves and their mothers' servants, but may supply 
any meal or any dish for which any family of their 
membership circle makes timely application. 

If any circle of mothers would encourage their 
daughters to establish such a co-operative store and 



122 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING- 

cooking department, not a single requirement of 
which is at all more difficult than the getting up of 
the fairs and festivals at which women and girls are 
everywhere so apt — the remaining housekeeping 
departments of sewing and laundering would easily 
follow, and the whole housekeeping revolution, so 
far as that set of mothers is concerned, would be a 
question of only a very few years. An organi- 
zation is a living germ. Plant it, and you can have 
no more conception of what it will dare and ac- 
complish before its mission is ended, than by 
looking at a small unknown seed can be guessed 
what wonder of flower and fruit it will bring 
forth. 

The historian of Rochdale Co-operation, George 
Holyoake, states that in the artisan class, the young 
women who are members of a co-operative store 
are decidedly more sought in marriage than those 
who are not. Not only has such a girl a little 
something of her own in the ever-accumulating 
profits on her purchases ; the fact that she has had 
the sense and self-control to save her money for 



THE MISSma LINK. 123 

such an investment, goes to show that she will 
prove a thrifty and prudent wife. — And on similar 
principles, if contemporary mothers would encour- 
age their daughters to become co-operative house- 
keepers, and give them as their own all the profits 
on the family purchases that now go to the retail- 
ers, — how much more easily would those daughters 
marry ! What different married comfort and hap- 
piness would these mothers prepare for their sons ! 

To ignore the all- controlling importance of 
MONEY in marriage is simple fatuity. It is safe to 
say that girls by thousands remain unmarried, and 
by ten thousands marry, not where they would but 
where they must, simply from want of money. 

Men like to feel that they support their wives, 
but in reality nothing is so satisfactory to even a 
manly man as that his wife should have money of 
her own. Nothing attracts men to girls in society 
like the possession of money. There is nothing 
they will so readily offer themselves to as money. 
There is nothing they defer to in a woman like 
money. 



124 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

Nor is this so discreditable to men as to the 
romantic feminine mind at first statement it ap- 
pears, for it is but the involuntary expression of 
how anxious and hazardous an undertaking, amid 
the relentless competitions of civilization, men feel 
to be the attempt single-handed to support a family, 
with the chances of mistakes, mismanagement, ill- 
success, ill-health and even death, as so many pos- 
sible breakers upon which domestic happiness may 
founder. 

Few young men, on the contrary, would fear to 
marry a girl who was a co-operative housekeeper, 
because, first, if a husband should die, and leave 
his wife nothing, she would be sure to find em- 
ployment, and therefore a support, in her House- 
keeping Association ; second, co-operators have 
found that from five to ten per cent is saved to the 
family in the superior quality and accurate weight 
and measure which are among the fundamental busi- 
ness principles of co-operative stores ; third, his wife 
■would get back a continual cash dividend of ten per 



THE MISSING LINK. 125 

cent on everything that his family consumed ; and 
fourth, all the processes of housekeeping would ap- 
pear in the domestic firmament as perfect and with- 
out friction as are the motions of the heavenly 
bodies. 

Which rolls and bread are the surest to be good 
of their kind — those left daily at the door by a 
first-class baker, or those made at home by a suc- 
cession of cooks each with different standards and 
difierent methods ? And as with bread, so with 
every other article that could be prepared in the 
co-operative rooms, whether in food, in clothing, or 
in laundering. The three household trades being 
at last reduced to a system, their products would be 
characterized by the perfection that only training 
and system can develop. 

Then no more spoiled dishes, no more wasted 
materials ! No longer the insolent, half-kempt cook, 
the cockroaches and the rats, the greasy pots and 
kettles for the poor tyro in housekeeping to con- 
tend with on the other side of the dining-room 
wall ! A single neat-handed Phyllis could suffice 



126 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

to do up the dainty rooms, to lay and wait upon 
the table, make the tea and toast and serve the 
delicate little meals " for two " that would arrive 
twice daily as punctually as the clock pointed the 
prescribed hour. After breakfast the young hus- 
band would go down to his business of earning the 
family money, and the young wife would go to the 
co-operative rooms to hers of saving it, for three or 
four hours in the morning, where, even if her post 
were in the co-operative kitchen — with paid 
*' hands " to do the dish and kettle washing, she 
would find superintending or even preparing the 
most difficult recipes in its airy, spotless precincts 
a pleasure. 

If later, more imperious cares should assert 
themselves for her, her place could be filled by 
some unmarried girl who was all ready to step into 
it, and she herself could stay quietly at home for 
as many years as her little children demanded her 
attention. Afterward she would again be free to 
assume active duties in the co-operative circle. 

In Co-operative Housekeeping, the unmarried 



THE MISSING LINK. 127 

girls, widows, deserted wives, maiden ladies and 
mothers with children nearly grown, would be 
found quite sufficient to keep all its offices full. 
The "nursing mothers," who are only about one in 
three or four of all women, would be completely 
exonerated from executive work away from home 
if they desired it, and what a difference would it 
make in the health and strength, the beauty and 
morale of the race, if, before the birth of their little 
ones, mothers could be cared for and quiescent, and 
could have the family meals and the family washing 
sent home to them, instead of being tired and fretted 
with incessant household drudgery as the immense 
majority of them are now ! 

In the city of New York there are only about 
thirty thousand servants to its more than two 
hundred and seventy thousand families. That 
tells the tale ! — Even in the richest of our 
cities, the wives of nine families in ten must "do all 
their own work " as unremittingly as do the 
farmers' wives in the country ! In truth house- 
keeping now covers the surface of society like a 



128 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

universal iron grating, and is upheld from crushing 
it, not by stone caryatids, but by living women, 
each standing apart until she sinks in her place. 
But if housekeepers, or even the daughters of 
housekeepers, were united among themselves — 
housekeeping would rise on the two great forces 
of combined capital and organized labour as on 
two mighty wings, and bear up all women with it ! 



IX. 

WOMEN IN THE STATE. 

A CRITIC in the New York Nation for March 
16, 1882, said that: — " Women have never made 
any important original contribution to science even 
in psychology or sociology," and that "Mr. Buckle 
does not support his theory of the fertility of the 
female imagination by a single instance of a valu- 
able hypothesis conceived by a woman." 

The theory of "Co-operative Housekeeping" was 
given by me to the public fifteen years ago, but 
because it was a theory by a woman ahoxd women, 
the lofty aasculine intelligence of the country has 
never yet cox^ descended to notice it. — I therefore 
fiankly ask of the writer in the Nation whether, to 
have p^erceived that ,>ll the difficulties of the woman 
questiorij arise from ti e fact that in an organic 
society oi^most complicated structure, the woman 



130 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

element which constitutes just one half its available 
force, is wholly unorganized and therefore a con- 
tinual obstruction and pull-back — was not an 
" original contribution " to scientific sociology quite 
as " important " as any of the generalizations from 
compared phenomena that have given reputation 
to certain English thinkers ? — And I should fur- 
ther like to ask the same critic, whether the hypoth- 
esis that this needed organization of the Avoman 
element should begin, not on the political basis of 
voting, (as the Nation^ rather to its present morti- 
fication, once advocated) but on the industrial basis 
of their own housekeeping, is not a venture of the 
" female imagination " in constructive sociology 
quite as " valuable" as any that has emanated from 
the male imagination since the immortal formula of 
Thomas Jefferson in 1776 ? 

For if public faith in the hypot^^esis that ic all 
men are created free and equal, and have equal 
rights to the pursuit of life, l^.^oerty and happjness," 
be, as Americans believe, ?xt the bottom of j^he great 
development of the Amerio:an republic, vhat might 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 131 

we not expect from the public belief that it is not 
only the right — it is the duty of women to organize 
among themselves in order to secure to the world 
a higher and more perfect type of housekeeping 
than has ever been attempted or even imagined ? 
There is absolutely nothing excepting human inertia 
in the way of making Co-operative Housekeeping^ a 
reality, and, if carried out, it would transform one- 
half the human race from helpless financial children 
into self-supporting, self-directing adults, and 
would therefore affect all existing social conditions 
and adjustments not less than did the growth up- 
ward cf the middle classes from serfdom into 
freedom throughout the Middle Ages. 

Aside from the economic necessity of this femi- 
nine industrial organization, however, the complete 
justification of Co-operative Housekeeping ]ies in 
one long-fixed principle, viz : the profits op 

MANUFACTURma BELONG BY RIGHT TO THE MAN- 
UFACTURER. 

Housekeeping is manufacturing, and the profits 
of the goods used by women in their cooking, in 



132 CO -OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

their sewing, in their washing and ironing for the 
human family, ought to belong to them, instead of, 
as now, to the retail trader, or to the co-operating 
husband and father who in England has largely 
stepped in to supersede him. — Lord Holland, when 
he was Mr. Fox, said " he had served up to the 
Treasury and would have it ! " — And so, in the last 
six thousand years, have women served up to the 
profits of their housekeeping, and they should have 
them ! 

And they can yet have them if they will take 
them, though not for long. Already an immense 
portion — that " spinning and weaving," in which 
only a hundred years ago all bore a part — has slip- 
ped away from them. They could not get it back if 
they tried, and now, instead of returning through 
co-operation in beneficent rills for the refreshing of 
every household, the profits of these world-old fem- 
inine industries roll in solid pactolean streams past 
the pale crowds of the factory operatives into the 
already overflowing coffers of a few capitalists. 
A like process of organization by capitalists of all 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 133 

the remaining household industries is inevitable, 
and is even now knocking loudly at the door of the 
trembling American home. Within the twenty-one 
years of the writer's married life alone, the making 
of women's and children's dresses and underwear, 
the laundering of shirts, collars and cuifs, the can- 
ning of fruits and vegetables, the preparing of 
soups and pressed meats, together with twenty 
such trifles as the roasting and grinding of coffee, 
the mixing of indigo with water for the blueing 
purposes of the laundry, etc., etc., have largely 
passed out of housekeeping hands, and of course, 
the expenses of living have increased by just so 
much as the profits of all these now extensive man- 
ufactures amount to. There is just as much money 
to he made out of the household coolcing^ ivashing 
and sewmg of to-day as there was out of the house- 
hold spinning, weaving and knitting of past centu- 
ries, and American men, with their restless, acquis- 
itive energy, have already found it out. If 
American women do not within ten years begin to 
organize their housekeeping for the family benefit^ 



134 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING-. 

men will surely organize it for their personal benefit, 
and the grand-daughters of the matrons who now 
in their own houses talk complacently about home 
being the *' natural sphere of woman," will, if 
single, herd in cheap lodging-houses as the under- 
paid and underfed employes of great cooking, 
laundering and sewing firms, or as wives and kept 
mistresses will live in hotels, boarding-houses and 
flats — practical toys ^v^ho have difficulty to kill the 
time that is hanging on their hands. 

I most solemnly believe that this question of In- 
dependent vs. Co-operative Housekeeping involves 
the destruction or salvation of the home life that as 
her most sacred possession America inherited from 
her Anglo-Saxon forefathers and fore-mothers. — 
A westerner once defined a wife most exquisitely 
as "something to come home to." — But there are 
no "homes," such as we understand them, in Italy. 
There are none in Spain. France has no word, 
even, for "home," and in comparatively domestic 
Germany itself, so bare and cheerless are the flats 
in which families generally live, that for a glimpse 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 135 

of happiness the whole population must stream 
forth every night to beer-gardens ! — "When Ameri- 
can wives no longer create their own homes, but 
are puppets whose every want is supplied by organic 
forces utterly outside of and beyond them, will 
American men care any longer to "come home" to 
them ? 

In discussing " Woman's queenly office with 
respect to the State," Ruskin remarks — 

tt ¥r * ^ That people are generally under the impression 
that a man's duties are public and a woman's private. But 
that is not altogether so. A man has a personal work or duty 
relating to his own home, and a public work or duty which is 
the expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman 
has a personal work or duty, relating to her own home, and a 
public work and duty which is also the expansion of that. 
Man's duty as a member of a commonwealth is to assist in the 
maintenance, in the advance, in the defence of the state. Wo- 
man's duty as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in 
the ordering, in the comforting, in the beautiful adornment of 
the state. What the man is at his own gate, defending it if need 
be, against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in a 
more devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his country, 
leaving his home if need be, even to the spoiler, to do hia 



136 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPIIs^G. 

more incumbent work there. In like maniier what the woman 
is to be within her gates, as the centre of order, the balm 
of distress and the mirror of beauty, that she is also to be 
without her gates, where order is more difficult, distress more 
imminent, loveliness more rare." 

How shall the more fortunate women of society 
perform this needed and noble function for the less 
fortunate? 

" By the Ballot — by Manhood Suffrage," insists 
a large and intelligent and influential class of wo- 
men. 

"By Co-operation in Housekeeping" maintain 
I, — for among men, civil liberty for the masses 
sprang out of their first co-operating in various 
industries, and then banding together in leagues to 
protect them ; and to be solid and secure, liberty 
among women should evolve itself in the same 
natural order and sequence. 

What, in Heaven's name, can the ballot do for the 
housekeeping problem? What can it do for the 
expenses-of-living problem ? What can it do for 
the wages-to-operatives problem ? What can it do 



WOMEN IN TUE STATE. 137 

for the fallen-woman problem ? * Nothing — abso- 
lutely nothing ! and when such tremendous interests 
as these are at stake for American womanhood, it 
is to me a spectacle almost to ' make angels weep ' 
to see the only class of women we have who are 
actively consulting and working together for, as 
they think, the "advancement of women," content- 
ing themselves with demanding from men the 
irrational concession of the ''ballot!" 

I have always steadily opposed the extension of 
"manhood " suffrage to women. A woman is not 
a man, and should not make her appearance in 
politics as a man. Though all the elements of her 
nature are the same as his, her functions are differ- 
ent, and therefore the proportion of her powers is 
different. He is the protecting paternal strength, 
she the protected maternal weakness of society. 
Thus her vote can never represent the same thing 
that his does, and to extend to her the manhood 
suffrage would be to perpetrate a gigantic political 
lie of which the consequences might be incalculably 

*Appeiidix G. 



138 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

evil.* Men are wise, therefore, to deny it to 
women, and women are wise to deprecate it, as the 
overwhelming majority of them do. 

On the other hand,t " the okl fiction that women 
are already represented by men, is now exploded 
with every thinking person. It is true that all the 
interests of men and women, rightly considered, 
are identical ; but the sexes attach such very differ- 
ent degrees of importance to different interests, that 
each is inclined to overlook entirely considerations 
which to the other are of the highest moment. 
The classification usually made is, that men 
must look after the public affairs of the nation ; 
women, after its private ones, — that is, after the 
comfort and happiness of its households considered 
separately. 

'^ Now, the truth is, that wherever a class of 
persons is engaged in doing the same thing, in 

* Appendix H. 

f The following three or four pages are reprinted from a 
pamphlet on the Democratic Party published by the author 
in 1875. 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 139 

just SO far do tliey have common interests which 
can only be regulated by mutual consultation and 
agreement; and "public affairs" are nothing but 
such class interests on the largest scale. And so 
when one-half the adult world is engaged in the same 
functions, there must of necessity be an immensely 
important circle of these " common interests " that 
can not be wisely regulated by any but the mem- 
bers of the class itself, and which can not be over- 
lojked or neglected without the greatest detriment 
to society, to the individual, and, finally, to the 
nation. A steady stream of criticism and ridicule 
is poured out upon women by the press, for their 
dress, their mismanagement of their children, their 
incompetency with their servants, their aimless and 
thoughtless charity-giving, their superficial educa- 
tion and make-believe accomplishments ; and yet, 
when we look at individuals, we must confess that 
most women are trying faithfully to do the best 
they know how ; only, in this formidable and com- 
plicated machine, half-social, half-political, in which 
they and their families are intricated, each one 



140 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

separately is too weak to accomplish anything 
alone. Try how she may, she cannot reverse its 
smallest wheel ; and so she is forced to take things 
as she finds them, and get on as well as her nu* 
merous disabilities will let her. 

" The sober truth, then, is that so long as there 
are over two millions of women in this country 
who, by various industries, earn their own living, 
and over seven millions who have to buy and pre- 
pare food and clothing for their families, to manage 
servants, to bear and bring up children, to look 
after the poor, and to reclaim the criminal, — -just 
so long will women need common consultation and 
agreement on all these duties, relations, and inter- 
ests. But, of course, nine or ten millions of women 
cannot consult and agree together, any more than 
can nine or ten millions of men. Then they must 
adopt the same device that men have done, and 
accomplish their object by a system of representa- 
tion not confounded with, but parallel to, that of 
men. — In short, the true solution of the present 
agitation among women for their " rights " is to 



WOMEN m THE STATE. 141 

give them what, if in this free land they did not 
crave, they would be more degraded, proportionally, 
than the harem concubines of the East, — and that 
is, a corporate life and organization of their own 
similar to that among men, and placed in constitu- 
tional relations with the public bodies now con- 
trolling the destinies of the community." 

For years, therefore, I have advocated * that 
women should elect delegates of their own sex to 
t\e State and National Legislatures, and to the 
town and city councils, and that these delegates 
should constitute a " Woman's Committee " or 
*' Woman's House" which should have the privilege 
of introducing bills into the other Houses, and of 
sending back for reconsideration any measure of 
which a majority of its members disapproved. In 
this way women would make their appearance in 
politics solely as women. Their influence would 
be a purely womanly influence, their methods would 
be purely womanly methods. They would, in short, 
instead of confusing masculine politics with votes 
that had no physical equivalent behind them, take 



14.2 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

their place for nothing more and nothing less than 
they are, i, e. the Advisory, not the Compulsory 
Force of the world, and their effect upon city. State 
and national councils could not but be for good. 

So few women, comparatively, are in business, 
or own any taxable property, or attempt any serious 
action together, that as a class they do not much 
feel the need of class representation, and therefore 
this idea has not hitherto seemed to have much 
weight or value. But if women should ever, through 
Co-operative Housekeeping, control large business 
interests and accumulate in their own hands the 
profits that now enrich the middle-men, the neces- 
sity of looking after the taxation of their interests 
and savings, if nothing else, would eventually com- 
pel them to send representatives to the Legislatures 
as a matter of course. 

At first these might constitute a Third House, 
as above suggested, or merely a Woman's Commit- 
tee ; but after a time it would occur to men that 
three Houses were superfluous, and that the Senate, 
through all these generations, had in fact been only 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 143 

provisional against the era ■when man's constant 
companion and adviser in private affairs, the woman, 
should become sufficiently developed to take her 
rightful place as his best counsellor also in public 
ones. 

That this organic feminine development is not 
only the natural, but the inevitable advance that 
the present civilization must take, unless, like the 
civilizations of Greece, of Rome, of China and of 
India, it is to stop, stagnate and decay, it needs 
neither a prophetic nor a " scientific " eye to see. 
It needs only the homely common-sense conveyed 
in the vice-versa of the homeliest of proverbs, viz., 
that ^vhat is sauce for the gander is sauce for the 
goose!! — All civilizations have been only Organi- 
zations of Men among Themselves. The women 
have invariably been left unorganized, and as 
invariably those civilizations, no matter how 
remarkable, have remained abortive attempts to 
fully expand the flower of human possibility. 

Instead of looking at women, though on account 
of their different functions they are weaker in some 



144 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

things and stronger in others than men, as of 
essentially the same nature — beings "of like pas- 
sions with themselves," woven in the same web — 
moulded from the same clay, and to be treated 
accordingly — men from the very beginning have 
persisted in regarding and treating them as funda- 
mentally different. The " long results of time " 
of course prove this disastrous for both sides in 
every case without exception, and then, like Mr. 
Elliott in the North American, like the writer in 
the Nation, and like the Rev. Dr. Dix in the 
pulpit, they complain and feel injured, indignant, 
disapproving, or contemptuous because v/omen, pas- 
sive, obedient creatures, have not wrested themselves 
out of the complications in wdiich men, and men 
alone, have involved them. 

Never had the old fable of the Wolf and the Lamb 
better illustrations than these unmanly, irrational 
criticisms of women by men which appear year 
after year in the leading journals, and are echoed 
by discontented husbands and fathers and brothers 
in the family ! It is really time they should be 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 145 

given over. The iron has entered into women's 
souls in this way long enough ! 

Men are too all-powerful with women, their do- 
minion over the feminine soul and body has hitherto 
been too absolute for them not to be solely responsi- 
ble for whatever social conditions are abroad in the 
world. They have had their own way in every- 
thing. What the ancient woman was, the ancient 
man made her. What the modern woman is the 
modern man has made Aer.* He has done it all, 
and " yet he is not happy." He wishes to own 
and carry " his womankind " *(as the half-scornful 
English phrase has it), as absolutely as the patri- 
archs did theirs, and yet he wishes them to walk 
lightly on their own feet besides! — But such a 
human paradox cannot be consummated. Woman 
must be either man's burden or his help. She 
must be either his blight or his stimulus ; and if he 
prefer the latter alternative he must set her down 
as speedily as may be, and give her " right of way '* 

♦Appendix I. 



146 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

on the self-same road that he has hitherto monopo- 
lized for himself. — He must give her the absolute 
right of free and untrammelled consultation and 
action among her fellows for housekeeping or any 
other legitimate purpose. 

Did public opinion — did the press, the pulpit 
and the fireside will it, the whole vast feminine rev- 
olution which has been a dream so long, could be 
realized for the United States as well within the next 
five and twenty years as within the next five cent- 
uries. For American women have not painfully 
to hew out from the wilderness of the Unknown, 
as since the days of Abraham men have been 
doing, the paths and processes of civilization. 
These are all ready and waiting for their use. They 
have but to desert the savage custom of working 
alone, for the civilized method of working in har- 
monious association — have but to join their house- 
hold buying, and combine their household manu- 
facturing, to show the world of what indeed true 
womanhood is made — what free and therefore 
joyous wifehood may be. 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 147 

Mr. Elliott quotes from some one who said 
that — 

«' No great step can be made until woman is snatched from 
unremitting toil and made what nature meant her to be — the 
centre of a system of social delights. Domestic avocations 
are those of her peculiar lot." 

Most true, and through Co-operative House- 
keeping only can woman become such a centre, 
because only through a system that will make 
civilized womanhood an organic whole, as civilized 
manhood is, can the dignity and happiness of every 
woman be the care and the duty of all other women, 
instead of, as now, the sport of the caprice or the 
fortune of individual men. 

For years a protest has been going up because 
the wages of working-women are so much less in 
proportion than those of working-men. Only very 
recently, the Viscountess Harbeton published an 
article in La Nouvelle Bevue, in which she en- 
deavors to prove that the destitute condition of 
seamstresses in London and Paris is due to their 
exclusion from the polls ! ! The lady says that 



148 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

there are in London sixty thousand seamstresses 
who earn from one to two shillings a day as shirt 
and ulster manufacturers, while in Paris female 
tailors earn less than two francs a day. 

But what is the real reason of this "destitute 
condition " of seamstresses or any other working- 
women ? It is that while the rich and the edu- 
cated men everywhere organize and stimulate and 
pay the industry of working-men, the rich and 
the educated women nowhere do anything of the 
kind for working-women, but allow their husbands 
and fathers and brothers to support them in com- 
fort or luxury, and to pay all the working-women 
also! 

Now how, I ask, can the capitalists of the world, 
large or small, support the vast army of '' ladies," 
and pay the far vaster army of working-women full 
wages besides ? Simply, they can not do it, and 
the salaries and wages of the weaker sex will never 
rise to an equality with those of the stronger, until 
educated women are permitted to undertake for 
ignorant women the same function that educated 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 149 

men so splendidly fulfil for ignorant men. The 
railroad and steam navi2;ation magnates are noth- 
ing but common carriers for the public, but how 
many of the industrial classes could they employ 
compared with the millions who do find their daily 
bread in their service, did they each content them- 
selves with driving one express wagon, or rowing a 
single ferry-boat ? Yet in independent housekeep- 
ing, this is just what the social leaders among 
women are doing. Each one " directs " her own 
petty establishment, and limits her power of organ- 
izing labor to the two or more servants whom she 
employs within it. Well may the working-women 
outside this restricted sphere be "destitute," — 
but the heavy hand that crushes them is not the 
greed of the opposite sex. It is the moral slavery 
and consequent mental laziness of their own ! In 
short, the whole question is purely a question of 
brain-work. When upper-class women are en- 
couraged to cease hiding their organizing talent in 
a napkin, and to exert the brain-power they abun- 
dantly possess for carrying on great housekeeping 



150 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

corporations, lower-class women will have justice 
in their wages, and until then they never can have 
justice. jN'ot through communism, as Mr. Elliott 
wildly imagines, but solely through united house- 
keeping, can women reach what he calls " the 
only cure — which is — that the strong must care 
for and help the weak, the wise the foolish, the 
old the young, and the young the old." 

But for this, adult women, like adult men, must 
be Free Agents ! 

A thinker far more powerful and profound than 
Mr. Elliott — Henry George — finds the cause of the 
alarming humanitarian complications of to-day, in 
the individual ownership of land. Strange that so 
acute a mind should not perceive that the individ' 
ual ownership of women, by which free action on 
the part of every wife and daughter in existence is 
in all cases hampered and in most cases suppressed, 
is — must be, — one-half the difficulty at least ! And 
yet Mr. George himself says in golden words : — 
"Civilization is Co-operation. Union and 
Liberty are its factors." — When men bestow, 



WOMEN IN THE STATE. 151 

not the counterfeit liberty of "the ballot," but the 
real liberty of absolute freedom of household ac- 
tion on women, and when women utilize that liberty 
by Union among Themselves, then, and not till 
then, will Mr. Elliott's millenium for them begin 
to dawn. 



X. 

CONCLUSION. 

ITearlt nineteen hundred years ago, the L-'rd 
Jesus Christ — ^blessed be His Name ! — by tne, 
to those that listened, incredible command,* 
not only declared woman a monogamic wife, 
but fixed her in the family circle from which hith- 
erto she had at will been continually shifted, and 
gave her a chance to show there what feminine 
influence might in time accomplish. The single 
sentence which forbade men to divorce their wives 
save for one cause, was the beginning of the regen- 
eration of woman — the first article of her Magna 
Charta. For the first time in history she was 
granted in the world a firm foothold, and from that 
she went slowly but surely on to climb to whatever 
heights men have since permitted her to attain. 
Still far below them, she is nevertheless at the 

* Appendix J. ' 



CONCLUSION. 153 

point where if they were wise they would now reach 
down to her a helping hand. 

For as in the physical world, the male can 
beget, but not bring forth, so in the moral and 
intellectual realms man has originated, but he 
has never yet perfected. Then the Creator of the 
human pair must have confided the latter function 
to the intenser love of order and beauty, and to the 
deeper patience and self-denial in attaining them, 
with which He endowed the woman, though with 
each woman confined within the circle of her own 
family, the real scope and breadth of the feminine 
energy has hitherto been lost to the successive so- 
cieties which yet have needed it so much ! 

Did I say that the mothers of this generation 
should inaugurate Co-operative Housekeeping for 
their daughters ? 

Nay, if the young men of the generation — the 
future " lords and masters " of its now free and 
innocent girlhood, had the first conception either 
of their own best happiness or of their awful 
responsibility toward that half of the community 



154: CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

to which they owe tlieir lives, and of which they are 
soon to be the absolute arbiters — instead of building 
costly club-houses principally for the purposes of 
eating and drinking, of smoking and gambling, of 
gossiping much and reading a very little — they 
would use the same money in erecting noble and 
cheerful work-rooms for housekeeping functions, 
and would if necessary employ all their arts of fas- 
cination to persuade their girl-friends there to 
inaugurate the new Civilized Housekeeping for 
the American household. So doing, they would 
complete the work begun eighteen centuries past 
also by a Young Man — even by the ' Sun 
of Righteousness ' — their Divine Brother. Like 
Him, they would be the Saviours, the Redeemers 
of the feminine world. 

Alas, it is they who more and more every year 
are its destroyers ! 

For see how they continually crowd women closer 
to the wall ! — The New York papers have lately 
devoted much space to describing a number of 
magnificent flats erected in that city and designed 



CONCLUSION. 155 

for the use of bachelors alone. This, of course, is 
in the direct line of those imitations of France and 
England to which Americans have long been so 
prone, and in which one treachery to their own 
nobler social customs has inevitably followed close 
upon another. 

Do the fair and virtuous mothers and daughters 
of New York, as perchance they sigh over these 
descriptions of bachelor palaces, carry the 
thought one step farther and ask themselves who 
and what are the women that will supply the femi- 
nine element of these luxurious celibate menages 
— for surely they are not naive enough to suppose 
that no women will enter there ? No indeed ! If 
the false equilibriums of a one-sided civilization force 
women to forego that fireside association with the 
other sex "without which," says Hawthorne, 
"existence is a blank"— on their part men have 
no conception of doing without the feminine com- 
panionship which is equally, or even more, an indis- 
pensable necessity to themselves. — Simply, for the 
wife they substitute the deadly enemy of the wife. 



156 CO-OPERATIVE nODSEKEEPING. 

And why is this ? It is because she demands 
less and costs less than does that "other self" to 
whom a man must give his name and all the privi- 
leges and emoluments of his position, though as 
far as earning or saving money is concerned, the 
latter has become as minus a quantity as is her 
unprincipled rival. Courtesans never are, never 
have been, in any age of the world, workers. Un- 
til our own age, wives always have been workers. 
It is by their work, by their money value alone to 
their husbands and consequently to the community, 
that they have held their own against the beautiful, 
lawless, idle "professionals '^ who, once ruined, are 
from necessity forever trying to undermine them. 
Consciously or unconsciously, everything in this 
world is rated at a money value. What it will 
bring in its own market is the measure of its desir- 
ableness, and consequently, of the respect that it 
commands. In the matrimonial market, nearly 
all the women of the working classes marry. There 
are few or no single women among them, because 
unmarried they take care of themselves, and mar- 



conclusion; 157 

ried they are the domestic servants of their hus- 
bands, and often supplement the latter's earnings 
by their own. 

"My son," said an American fatlier, "how could you 
marry an Irish girl? " " Why, father, I'm not able to keep 
two women. If I marriel a Yankee girl I'd have to hire an 
Irish girl to take care of her ! " 

There is more truth than jest in this light 
shaft from one of the newspaper wits of the 
hour. — It is not only as cheap — it is actually 
cheaper for a working-man to marry than it 
is to board ! In the same way, all the 
gentlemen, all the educated men of the rev- 
olutionary period w^ere married men. George 
Washington's mother and wife, and all the ladies 
of their circle, were incessantly industrious, and 
through the spinning and weaving, the sewing and 
knitting, the salting and pickling that went on in 
their households under their supervision, were 
producers of actual values. Such women were not 
" supported " by their husbands. In fact, it is an 
entire misapprehension and falsehood in political 



158 CO-OPEEATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

economy to speak of womanliood through any past 
generation of history as having been *' supported " 
by manhood, or of any woman of to-day who "does 
her own work " as being " supported " by her hus- 
band. Her husband pays for the roof over her 
head and for the raw materials with which she 
works, but for him and his offspring she turns 
cloth into clothes, raw food into cooked food, a 
house into a home^ and so earns her living within 
those four walls just as surely as he earns his out 
of them. 

I say it is by virtue of these domestic services, 
and by these alone since the world began, that the 
lawful wife has hitherto maintained herself against 
the courtesan. There is no real chivalry in man- 
hood toward womanhood on the grand scale. There 
never has been — never will be. Man has always 
expected woman to give him an industrial equiva- 
lent for all he vouchsafes her, and if young 
Englishmen, and even, of late, young Americans, 
as Mrs. Howe asserts, are cultivating rude, selfish 
and neglectful manners toward young ladies, it is 



CONCLUSION. 159 

but the involuntary expression of man's involuntary 
contempt for an article in womanhood at once costly 
and unserviceable. 

"The word <wife/" says Rusldn, "means 
* weaver,' and women must either be house-wives or 
house-moths. In the deep sense, they must either 
weave men's fortunes and embroider them, or feed 
upon and bring them to decay." 

Such products of civilization as the correspond- 
ent of the Bishop of Manchester are dear at any 
price. Excepting those so beautiful, fascinating or 
rich that men cannot help marrying them, the 
world has no use for them. In no single particu- 
lar are they necessary factors either in its success 
or in its joy, and it is not surprising that young 
men are electing bachelorhood and its crimes, 
rather than by married fatherhood to add any more 
such helpless — nay, destructive — beings to an 
already over-burdened society. 

"Indolence, vice, prodigality and immorality in 
every form," says the New York Sun (June 10, 
1883) " seem to mark the daily life of the gilded 



160 CO-OPEKATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

youth of New York. Not a week passes that some 
violation of law and decency is not brought con- 
spicuously before the public, and the recent case of 
petty larceny of the most contemptible kind wdiich 
has been exposed on Staten Island, shows of how 
little avail in the preservation of honor and moral- 
ity are birth, name, or breeding." 

When the " gilded " girlhood of New York — gift- 
ed, high-spirited and fascinating, as it seems to me, 
above every other — reads such comment as this 
upon the manhood that it meets in society, must it 
not blush and burn with shame for that degenerate 
manhood, utterly unfit as it is declaring itself for 
all the demands of responsible existence? — "I 
would have you know," said the Apostle Paul 
— nor is there anything so important to know — 
" that the head of every man is Christ, and the 
head of the woman is the man, and the head of 
Christ is GOD." In their " vast vortex of revo- 
lutionary rage against all that restrains the license 
of mankind" men of the highest social position 
(and therefore of the most far-reaching 



CONCLUSION. 161 

influence) are actually abrogating the Order 
of the Universe ! — Rather than take Christ 
for their Head, they abdicate their own headship 
over women, and are leaving them everywhere 
without a home and without a guide. 

Can it principally be because the women, also, 
of the highest social position, have in large measure 
abandoned housewifery to housekeepers and ser- 
vants, and because other women on every hand are 
imitating them, that society has at last become so 
wholly disordered? Beyond and above all their 
other functions, the highest function of women is to 
Uphold the Ideals of Life. The foremost of these 
is the ideal of duty. As a brilliant young husband 
once said to a friend of the writer, " A man's 
wife represents to him his duty ! " — but surely 
not unless he sees her doing her duty. Conse- 
quently, when self-sacrifice ceases to be the law 
of women, as in all opulent communities it now is 
ceasing, self-indulgence immediately becomes the 
gospel of men. " Is it because we are house- 
11 



162 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. 

moths and not house-wives^'* should the brilliant 
New York girls ask of each other, ' that indolence, 
VICE, PRODIGALITY and IMMORALITY in evory 
form ! !' have come to * mark the daily life * of the 
men we ought to marry? " 

Oh, if from the dread knowledge and experience 
of middle life one could appeal effectively to the pure 
and generous maidens of the time, I would say to 
them that if they could for one instant realize .the 
degradation down to which their own increasing 
domestic uselessness and consequent expensivenesa 
indirectly tempts men to drag their young sisters 
of a lower class — if they could understand what 
it is that so inscrutably keeps their men-friends 
from the married state that only half a century ago 
was the natural heritage of all Americans, — they 
would not lose one day or one hour in addressing 
themselves to the mastery of this Housekeeping 
Problem in which is bound up no* only all their 
own fondest hopes of love and home, but also the 
honor and purity of thousands of hapless girls less 
carefully guarded, but, up to some fatal point of 



CONCLUSION. 163 

yielding, as innocent, as beautiful, often as refined 
as themselves ! 

Can American womanhood be warned ? Will 
it be warned? 

If it will, then the conclusion of the whole 
matter is this: — 

As the highest women of a civilization stand or 
fall relatively to men, so in the long run stand or 
fall all the rest. Our civilization has reached a 
point where through the unbalanced working of 
mighty forces from which she has hitherto unthink- 
ingly held herself aloof, the educated woman — the 
*' lady " — has sunk below the original level of 
womanly helpfulness, and to-day finds herself the 
burden, the great unsolved problem, the reproach, 
the sphinx of her own era. The philanthropist la- 
ments over her. The editor gibes at her. The divine 
fulminates against her. The men of her own circle 
depreciate and desert her. She is not yet reduced 
to the disgrace of invariably buying her husband 
with a dowry, as French women have long been. 



164 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPINa. 

but why should she wait for what will as surely 
follow the inauguration of clubs and flats for men 
alone, as the darkness follows the setting of the 
sun ? — Why, by the abyssmal fall to which she is 
even now toppling, should she drag down all other 
American women with her? 

Nay. Rather let her speedily gather up her 
feminine energies and ambitions, and as easily as 
in society she organizes one brilliant episode after 
another — ball, carnival, "Kirmess," theatricals, 
tableaux, what not — or as in philanthropy and 
religion she creates still some new beneficent insti- 
tution as soon as one is founded — so let her in sim- 
ilar combined effort, quickly place her housekeeping 
on the same associate plane with the innumerable 
industries of the strong, unregarding companion 
who has now left her so far behind. Then, aston- 
ished, shall he turn back to her in passion, pride 
and joy, and a true union shall be consummated 
between the once more equal pair whose bliss and 
whose glorious results will be something which the 



CONCLUSION. 165 

Evangelist of Love may have foreseen, but of which 
the poor, bewildered, yearning world has not yet 
dreamed. 

For then shall appear that promised Woman, 

* clothed with the sun' of her own achievements, 

* crowned with the stars' of her own fascinations, 
and with the descrescent 'moon' of her old humilia- 
tions * under her feet,' of whom refulgent Man, 
while still remaining the eternal Lord, shall also 
be the eternal Worshipper ! 



APPENDIX. 



APPEiqDIX. 

"A" p. 42. 

The following cutting from the Springfield [Mass.) Republi- 
can gives a very good idea of how all house-mistresses and 
their servants worked in this country up to fifty years ago: — 

♦* An elderly lady was relating the other day in our hear- 
ing her experience in going out to do house-work in her 
younger days. She engaged with a lady in Columbia to do 
general house- work, no price being engaged upon, and en- 
tered upon her duties at once. About the first thing to be 
done outside the regular house- work was to make soap ; 
having assistance in putting up the leach, the rest of the work 
in making a4»arrel of soap she performed herself. Killing 
hogs came next in order, she trying the lard, taking care of 
the skins and helping to make sausages. Then came the 
butchering of beef, the tripe of which of course must be 
saved, and this she Avas required to dress alone. She spun 
the warp for thirty yards of all-wool carpet, and in the mean- 
time the lady was sick, and she officiated as nurse and did 
the washing, ironing and cooking for the family. At the 
end of four weeks she was to return home, and her bill was 
called for. Now, gentle reader, what do you think she 
charged for doing the amount of work as narrated above ? 



170 APPENDIX. 

The first week 75 cts., the second 83 cts., and the last weeks 
$1.00 each, making $3.58 for four weeks' service. The lady 
thought the price decidedly too high, and she threw off 
25 cts.!" 

Contemplate the contrast now ! From the very extremes 
of society — from the complicated domestic hierarchies of 
aristocratic London, to the almost primitive simplicity of our 
Southern households, comes the same wail about the unman- 
ageableness of servants under this unhappy " survival " of the 
unorganized housekeeping of our ancestors into the organ- 
ized modern era in which we live. " M. de S." in the New 
York Sun for March 25 (1883), thus writes concerning the 
servant question in England : — 

" When some trustful, ingenuous American matron raptur- 
ously extols our splendid domestic arrangements and envies 
us our well- drilled attendants and our facilities for house- 
keeping, we are not always candid enough to repudiate the 
implied compliment. * * * Here in London 
there is a deep-rooted malignant antagonism between the 
two classes; no amount of cringing servility on the part of 
the inferiors can gloss over their instinctive hatred for their 
superiors; no amount of good treatment or indulgence avails 
to win from them confidence or honest allegiance. Here 
kindness breeds contempt; consideration creates carelessness; 
truth begets dishonesty; reprimand, however justly adminis- 
tered, calls forth insolence. A system of cold stand-ofiishness, 
of short and peremptory command, of instant dismissal for 
the slightest ofi'ense, foreign as it may be to one's feelings, is, 
as experience proves it, the only successful one. Club ser- 



APPENDIX. 1'^ 



vants are avowedly the best, because most despotically treat- 
ed. They obey at a word, and are cashiered for a word. 
* * * In the wake of the foibles and failings of the ser- 
vants of the great, with their brutal tyranny over their own 
inferiors, and their utter recklessness and improvidence, fol- 
low the wretched annoyances of small households — excessive 
and systematic waste, fearful cooking, obstinate adherence 
to obselete and inconvenient habits, and the constant strik- 
ing for higher wages which falls heavily on fixed incomes, 
since the annual rise in the price of all necessaries affects only 
the employers. In the yet unsolved problem of reconciling 
the two antagonistic elements, lies the reason of the increas- 
ed emigration of whole families to the Continent, the break- 
ing up of homes, the living in lodgings, and the visible drift- 
ing toward hotel life, albeit the severe strictures on a similar 
course when practised in America." 

In the same month, March, 1883, the Augusta {Oa.) Chron- 
icle thus sketches " The Servant Girl of the South :" 

"Said a noted housewife and housekeeper: 'Oh, dear, what 
shall I do about servants? Bad servants are the bane of 
keeping house. The colored servant grows steadily worse. 
She is uncleanly, wasteful, pilfering, careless and story- 
telling. She robs me unsparingly to feed her children, or 
her sisters, or her friends, or to give away. If I give her 
the keys she helps herself. If I give her out the food, she 
is too sharp for me. She makes her dough too soft, and 
comes for the keys to get more flour to thicken it. Her 
tricks are endless. Talk about sharpness. One stupid cook 
will outwit a dozen ladies. My hairpins and pins all go 
every morning. My best napkins are used to dust or wipe 
dishes with. My finest dishes are broken or disappear mys- 



172 APPENDIX. 

teriously. They broke themselves or walked off upon their 
own feet. The old-time, well-tried servants of slavery days 
are disappearing, and soon will be entirely gone. The 
present generation of servants is almost worthless and getting 
worse. Think of changing servants monthly or oftener! 
There is no system of recommendation for protection. Why, 
the best cook I have had in years I had to turn off be- 
cause I found out she had been in the chain gang for 
theft." And the perplexed and gentle lady wrung her hands 
in despair over the colossal and unsolved and unsolvable 
problem. 

Let the reader take note that in London the " club ser- 
vants," who "obey at a word and are cashiered at a word," 
are "avowedly the best," "though most despotically 
treated." Why is this ? For the same reason that neither 
hotels, restaurants, nor the great shops, nor mills of any 
kind find any difficulty in procuring all the laborers they 
require. Simply, it is human nature to prefer to work under 
the clock-work regularity of an organization rather 
than under the immediate control of an individual will. 
Let housekeepers organize their housekeeping, and servants 
will become as docile, as honest, as skillful and as plentiful 
as are the "hands" in every other kind of manufacturing. 
"When the writer kept house for three or four persons with two 
servants, she had the same vicissitudes that befell her 
fellow housekeepers. Now that she is keeping house for 
twenty-four people with seven servants, she finds housekeep- 



APPENDIX. 



173 



ing a comparatively easy and organized affair. Each servant 
hasher own department and does one thing all day long. They 
become far more skillful, the work is better done, and they 
are contented and tranquil in their respective places from 
one month's end to another, the changes being far less fre- 
quent in proportion than in a private family. 

As for Southern housekeeping, it is simply self-evident that 
nothing short of the solid organization of housekeepers 
among themselves in Co-operative Housekeeping can possibly 
bring again the untruthful, dishonest, sensual, half-civilized 
negresses with whom Southern house-mistresses have to deal, 
within anything like the bounds of domestic law 
and order. For the slavery of a master the slavery of an or- 
ganization must be substituted before such low-grade moral 
natures as those of the African can possibly be trained, dis- 
ciplined, or controlled. Experience is proving every day 
that there was far more raison d'etre for the absolute subjec- 
tion of the colored masses to the white masses of the South 
than we of the North for years were willing to admit. — 
Most of what were supposed the peculiar "native" virtues of 
the negro are actually turning out to have been the result of 
his much- decried slavery 1 

When we turn to the North and inspect the country towns 
of which the vicinity is accessible to the city "summer 
boarder," from Maine to Minnesota, across the whole belt of 
the Northern States, it would seem that Co-operation in some 



174 APPENDIX. 

form must soon be forced upon village households in order to 
enable them to compete with the summer boarding-houses. 
To these establishments the daughters of the small Irish or 
French or German or Scandinavian farmers, as the case may- 
be, who once supplied "help" of the very best quality to the 
surrounding American households, now flock for the season. 
In them they have but one kind of work each to do. Their 
wages are high. They enjoy each other's companionship, 
and when the season is over they either go home with their 
gains for the winter or follow the summer-boarders to the 
cities. In either case the unfortunate house-mistresses of 
the neighborhood find themselves bereft, and their 
situation grows really terrible. No matter how 
large their families, how heavy their cares, how inadequate 
their health and strength, they are forced to get on alone, or 
to put up with make-shifts who ought to be in a reformatory 
school rather than in a respectable family. — Of course the 
servants are entirely in the right of it. "Why should they 
slave alone at " three trades at once " when they can do one 
thing all day at better wages in company with half a dozen 
or a dozen of their friends ? Some ladies in Vermont are now 
bestirring themselves to import more families into that State 
from Ireland. But of course it will be but the merest tem- 
porary palliation. If they would set up in each village a Co- 
operative Kitchen and a Co-operative Laundry,and superintend 
and work in it themselves even half as much as they now do 
at home, they would have no more trouble about "help V 



APPENDIX. 175 

«♦ B." p. 67. 

THE BON MARCHE. 

Almost every one knows this wonderful dry-goods store of 
Paris, but I think not many know that it is a benevolent 
work as well as a successful business undertaking. Mr. 
Boucicault, the founder, began life as a poor boy, and when 
able to have a little store of his own, his attention was di- 
rected to the welfare of his clerks, and he gave them, as soon 
as he was able, a home in his own house. From this small 
beginning the work has grown wonderfully. Mr. Boucicault 
died a few years ago, worth millions of dollars, and to-day 
the " Bon March6," carried on by his widow, employs thret 
thousand people. 

Two thousand of these people live in the building, and all 
the rest take their meals there. The first thing to be noticed 
by a party making a tour of inspection of this great concern 
is a large hall filled with desks, where a great many boys and 
young men are studying book-keeping. They review all the 
books of the store, and are paid a small amount for every 
mistake they find. In the evening, lessons are given gratuit- 
ously to the employes in English, German, instrumental and 
vocal music, and fencing. Concerts are given by the store in 
summer in the square by the side of the building; in 
winter, on the ground floor, which can be cleared by the por- 
ters in twenty minutes of counters and goods, when it is needed 
for that purpose or for balls. There are four dining rooms, one 
for the men clerks, one for the girls, one for the workwomen, 
and one for the porters, messengers and drivers. The menu 
for dinner of one day consisted of soup, one kind of meat, 
one kind of vegetables, and dessert, and for each person a 



176 APPENDIX. 

half pint bottle of wine. Coffee is extra; it costs two cents 
for a small cup and three cents for the large ones. Three 
hundred people are employed in the kitchen and as waiters 
in the dining rooms. For the clerks there is a room for 
amusements, where there are billiard tables, chess, checkers, 
dominoes, etc., but no card playing. 

The lady clerks have a pleasant little parlor, where there 
is a piano, and where they can spend their evenings when they 
choose. Each girl has a room entirely to herself, which is 
plainly but very comfortably furnished. There are rules to be 
observed by all, but they are not burdensome or oppressive; 
the doors are not closed on week days until 11, and on 
Sundays until 12.30 at night, but the occupations and enter- 
tainments make it more enticing to remain at home than to 
go out. Every one in the service of the "Bon March6" 
receives a certain commission on everything sold or delivered, 
and after a certain number of years' service each acquires an 
interest in the store that increases yearly. It is one of the 
most complete works of benevolence known. It would be 
almost impossible to think of any details that are not attended 
to. There is a barber's shop in the building for the use of 
the employes; a physician is employed by the store, and his 
services are free to all; moreover, there is an infirmary in 
another part of the city where those who are sick are cared 
for; a pair of boots is blacked for every member of the estab- 
lishment every day. When asked if any board was paid, the 
answer was *' No," but I suppose at least some difference is 
made in the salary. — The Fashion Courier, May, 1883. 

"C."p. 88. 
The following Prospectus and Rules for a Co-operative Store, 
drawn from English and the Cambridge experiences, will be 



APPENDIX. 



177 



sure to conquer a success if attempted in tlie spirit of faith, 
self-sacrifice, mutual concession and mutual upholding on the 
part of the members and officers of the association. 

1. Raise a capital of $1,250, in two hundred and fifty shares 
at $5 each. 2. Allow no member to own less than one or more 
than five shares. 3. Do not start the store until all the two 
hundred and fifty shares are paid up, and until at least thirty 
members have pledged it their family custom for one year. 
4. All transactions to be strictly for cash. 6. Sales to the 
members to be at the usual retail prices, and metal checks to 
be returned them for all sums spent at the store; the checks 
to be added up at the end of the quarter and a margin of 
profit credited to the member in proportion to the amount 
expended. 6. Premises and fixtures to be as cheap and rent 
as low as possible until success is secured. 7. All services to 
be voluntary except book keeping and porterage until success 
is secured. 8. The store not to send for orders or to deliver 
goods without extra charge. 9. The store to be open only 
twice a week at first. 10. The business to be managed by an 
Executive Committee of not less than nine or more than thir- 
teen, elected by the members. 11. The young girls of the 
association to be interested in helping the lady managers to 
do up supplies in convenient parcels for customers, as 2J, 5 
and 10 pound packages of tea, sugar, etc., etc. 12. The mem- 
bers to hold monthly, and the managers weekly business 
meetings, at which the treasurer shall always exhibit the 
state of the finances. 13. No expenditure to be made by any 
oflicer of the Association without a majority vote of the exe- 
cutive committee authorizing the same. 14. The monthly 
financial statement to be always copied and hung in the store 



178 



APPENDIX. 



for the inspection of members. 15, Each share to command 
one vote. 16. No profits to be paid to members who own less 
than five shares in the store. 17. Women too poor to pay for 
one share to be allowed to buy at the store until their profits 
equal the value of one share; after which, they to be members 
on the same terms as the other members. 18. All the ofl&cers 
of the store, except the auditors, to be women. 

Women who find themselves disposed to organize Co-oper- 
ative Housekeeping, will please note well that the only kind 
of co-operative store I advocate as the basis for it is the Roch- 
dale Store — that, namely, which sells at the current retail rates 
and accumulates profits for its members. The celebrated 
aristocratic co-operative stores of London which sell at cost, 
could not possibly serve as the foundation of Co-operative 
Housekeeping, because at the end of one or of five years, no 
savings would have been made for the members, and conse- 
quently no collective capital accumulated with which they 
could go on to develop the diflFerent housekeeping departments 
of Bakery, Kitchen, Sewing-Rooms and Laundry. 

The Rochdale Co-operators deprecate these aristocratic co- 
operative stores which sell at cost, because they say that they 
compete unfairly with the regular dealers. Besides, every- 
body is used to the scale of retail prices as they are. Why 
then disturb it, when it is so much better to let it stand and 
let whatever margin of profit there may be of the retail over 
the wholesale price accumulate for the benefit of the buyer 
and his or her family, and come back to the household in the 



APPENDIX. 179 

shape of a tangible saving at the end of the quarter, which it 
is worth while to lay up — instead of merely buying things a 
little cheaper all along the twelve-month ? These London 
stores, however, are as wonderful a success in their way as 
the Rochdale type of stores in theirs, and for the same reason. 
Instead of being given over to one man to manage at a fixed 
salary, as was the case in all the old "union" stores which 
failed, they are managed by a committee elected by the mem- 
bers, and which does the work of buying and superintendence, 
and assumes all the burden and responsibility of the under- 
taking as a voluntary service for the general good. — The first 
grand demand of every kind of successful co-operation is 
SELF-SACRIFICE. To co-opcratc successfully we must be actu- 
ated by that love for others which can " smite the chord of 
self" and make it " pass in music out of sight." Thus it is 
one of the truest expressions of Christianity which the world 
has ever seen, and some of the noblest Chi-istian gentlemen 
of our times, as Mr. T. Hughes and the Rev. Frederick Maurice 
were among the earliest to recognize its power, and cheer on 
its struggles for existence. 

«'D." p. 96. 

In fitting up a Co-operative Laundry care must be taken 
not to make one omission which proved a serious drawback 
in the Cambridge experiment. Without fail, the sorting- 
room must have one wall filled with rows of shelves divided 



180 



APPENDIX. 



into compartments, each large enough to hold a clean family 
washing. At a quarter to six every night, the ironers should 
bring in their work to be counted and credited to them by the 
piece, and then it should be sorted into each subscriber's 
box ; otherwise the sorting all comes on Saturday, at the end 
of the week, and to get each list correctly made out, the 
clothes put up in bundles, and sent home during that single 
day, is almost impossible. 

'*E."p. 104. 

In Boston, a hundred years ago, public schools were pro- 
vided only for boys. They were kept open all the year, but 
as during the summer months many of the boys were employed 
in gardening, somewhere near 1790 it was decided that 
rather than have the seats empty, it would be better to put 
girls into them. It was some time before provision was made 
for teaching girls throughout the school year, and women 
teachers were not introduced into the public schools before 
1830. 

"F." p. 134. 

Let me not be understood to say that any woman is justified in 
avoiding housework, no matter how repulsive. ** Do the 
duty nearest you " are Goethe's words of immortal wisdom. 
"Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might," 
teaches the Apostle. A married woman's first and nearest duty 
is to realize the home ideal. If she can not give her family 



APPENDIX 



181 



exquisitely neat rooms, or an exquisitely accurate table, ex- 
cept by the work of her own Lands, then she herself must 
unhesitatingly contribute the work. That is what, by the 
very act of her marriage, she has undertaken to do — to make 
a " home " for the man who gives her the prestige, the posi- 
tion, and the support of a married woman. A comfortless or 
unattractive house is not a home, and if such a house be all 
her husband gets in return for what he gives, she is not hon- 
estly carrying out her side of the bargain. She is a failure 
and a fraud. 

All the best hours of the writer's best years were sacrificed 
conscientiously to this same "dusty drudgery" of house-order- 
ing; but it was a sacrifice so costly and unnatural that it set 
her to devising how such waste of intellect and energy could 
be prevented for other women. The theory of " Co-operative 
Housekeeping " was the result. 

'' G." p. 137. 

Nothinjr can be done for this last othei wise hopeless prob- 
lem, until all young girls are secured suf&cient industrial or 
intellectual training to enable them to earn a living adequate 
to their needs, and then situations provided for them accord- 
ingly. This training should be undertaken by the State, and 
should be compulsory. The situations should be supplied by 
Co-operative Housekeeping Associations, which, beginning 
at first on the limited basis of groceries and dry-goods, would 
end by meeting all the demands of family life — from daily 



182 



APPENDIX. 



bread up to houses decorations and pictures, — and would 
therefore employ every variety of talent and qualification. 

"H."p. 128. 

The United States have on their hands the worldng 
out of a sufficient number of political lies analogous to 
that of extending manhood suffrage to women, to render them 
very cautious how they inscribe any more of them on their 
statute books. Our whole political system Avas framed by 
and for the homogeneous people which, at the close of 
the Revolution, constituted a Republic vmique in the history 
of the world. The bold and generous, but reckless and inex- 
perienced theory of Jeff"erson and his school apparently was, 
that men of any period and of any race and clime were suf- 
ficiently alike in their common manhood to warrant their ad- 
mission as genuine Americans into all our elective franchises. 
The Irishman, the German, the Italian, the Swede, all should 
have equal rights of citizenship on American soil with the 
Anglo-Americans who had stamped upon the country its lan- 
guage, its religion, its customs, and its laws. Upon all of 
these, accordingly, equal rights were conferred, and 
following out the unfortunate principle, at the close of the 
civil war, the same rights were given to the newly-emanci- 
pated negroes. What are the consequences ? We suff"er from 
them to-day in the almost absolute abandonment of politics by 
all leading and unimpeachable Americans, and in the ruling of 



APPENDIX. 133 

nearly all American cities, with tlieir vast moral, commercial, 
hygienic and artistic interests, by ignorant, unscrupulous 
and grasping aliens ! To give women the vote we know would 
double this ruinous foreign vote instantly ! — a cor^sideratiou 
which, aside from those mentioned in the text, should alone 
keep every American man and woman from bestowing ear or 
sympathy upon it. 

Let me hasten to add, however, that the extension of the 
American franchise to aliens was the only serious mistake in 
politics that the marvellous Jefferson made. He was the great- 
est theoretical, as Washington was the greatest practical states- 
man the world has seen, and the immortal principles of the great 
Party of which he was the founder — free-trade, hard money, 
local self-government and strict interpretation of the constitu- 
tion, must be the foundation stones not only of this republic, 
but of all republics which are in reality such unto all time. 
— And even Jefferson's one mistake could be easily and com- 
pletely remedied by abolishing our ward and district systems 
of town and State representation, wdiich have now long " out- 
lived their usefulness," and giving to natives and aliens alike. 
Proportional Representation. Let the Irish, the Germans, the 
Scandinavians, the Africans — let any men (except the men v/ho 
reject monogamic marriage, like the jNIormons or the Chinese) 
— ^liave as many representatives in the municipal councils 
and in the State and national legislatures, as their numbers 
entitle them to, and no more. The government of the country 



184 APPENDIX 

would then soon revert to the keeping of the American ele- 
ment which alone can wield, because it alone created it, 
and yet all the alien elements would have their full and fair 
representation besides. 

♦♦I." p. 145. 

No despotism of man over man that was ever recorded, was 
at once so absolute as the despotism— the dominion of men 
over women. It covers not only the whole political area. It 
owns not only the bodies of its subjects. Its hand lies heavily 
on their innermost personality, and its power is so tremendous 
that whatever they are, is because these absolute lords havs 
willed it. 

Savages need women to be their beasts of burden, and 
their women are so. In China men choose them to be crip- 
ples, and they are so. In India they decreed that widows 
should burn themselves alive on the death of their husbands 
and they did so. Mohammedans consider women soulless 
harem slaves, and they live so. In Italy and Spain men 
have long preferred that women should do nothing and be 
nothing, and long have they done nothing and been nothing. 
In modern Germany they are afraid to have them anything 
but "haus-frauen," and housekeeping is the German 
woman's only aspiration. In France they desire them to be 
mistresses, and French women have as yet made no stand 
for virtue. Englishmen and Americans like a women to 
be a cross or compromise between an equal companion and a 



APPENDIX. 



185 



slave, and English and American women adiiere tlae moral 
paradox very cleverly. Some Americans, however, want 
''plural wives," and plural wives they possess. The Shakers 
decline any wives at all, and the Shaker women are celibates. 
Still a third variety, the Oneida communists, like the Syrians 
and Egyptians of old, erected licentiousness into a religion, 
and American women willingly lent themselves to the un- 
speakable degradation. 

In fine, just as with a steel cutter a cook stamps vegetables 
into shapes to suit her fancy, so throughout history have 
men made women whatever they chose. — "The history of 
no people," said the German historian, Meiners, "of no 
other class of society, presents a spectacle so revolting, a 
spectacle that so powerfully excites the sentiments of horror 
and compassion, as the history of the condition of the female 
sex among most of the nations of the globe. The lot of 
slaves themselves was formerly enviable when compared 
with that of women. -5^ * -h- Among more than one-half 
of the human race the life of women was an uninterrupted 
series of hardships and humiliations, the patient endurance of 
which could hardly be expected of human nature, and the 
condition of the maid, the wife and the widow was a state of 
progressively aggravated subjection and misery, in which all 
the mortifications and evils of life were accumulated, and 
from which, on the other hand, almost all its pleasures and 
enjoyments were excluded." 



186 



APPENDIX. 



"Women have never taken but one revenge for tlieir mistaken 
treatment by men — involuntary, it is true, but invariable and 
complete. It is, that what husbands make their wives, they, in 
a generation or two, viake their sons. Where, like the Gothic 
tribes of old, men not only permit but demand that wives 
shall be absolutely loyal and faithful, and that they shall bo 
free and responsible agents and helpmeets in their own 
sphere, there the women bring forth free men — strong men 
— audacious, heroic, fierce, unconquerable men. To this 
day the blessing is upon the descendants of the free-spirited, 
blue-eyed and devoted wives of ancient Germany. Whether 
known as "Germans," as "English," or as "Americans," 
they are the governors in every quarter of the globe, and 
if they chose they could take it all ! But when, as in most 
races and countries, men limit women throughout the whole 
range of thought and action, and expect them to be 
virtuous only while they are watched, the sons that issue 
from such enslaved mothers are robbed beforehand of moral 
courage and self-respect. They arc born political slaves — 
natural, unemancipable slaves, like the French for instance, 
who, as one of themselves has said, "however often they go 
to the temple of Liberty, always find the goddess absent." 

Shall we say that the dwarfing and distortion of woman- 
hood by men from its best ideals which is the general chron- 
icle of history, has been something willful, or even conscious, 
on the part of that sex which gives to ours all its safety and 



APPENDIX. 187 

all its joy, and without which life would be simple blackness? 
Nay. It has happened only through woman's being so 
wholly absorbed in men, while men are wholly absorbed in 
themselves, and at the same time are united into masses, while 
women are disintegrated into units — that from the mere mo- 
mentum of things the odds have been so entirely against the 
weaker sex, and their whole story from the beginning until 
now, such a tragic illustration of the fable of the Iron and the 
Earthen Pots which sailed down stream together. 

I confess that to me the absolute obliviousness of women by 
men is the most extraordinary, as in view of all its incalculable 
consequences, it is the most colossal fact in history. We note 
it not only in the ignorant and brutish. It mortifies us in the 
most humane, the most tender, the most illuminated of men — ■ 
as witness the late gentle and brilliant John Green, who in 
his " History of the English People" — mark the expression ! 
— ^hardly alludes to the existence of one-half that people, its 
women, from one end of his work to the other. And yet he 
was a devotedly loved and loving husband ! 

In. view alone of the fact that of the two sexes, one is the 
Father and the other the Mother of the Race, would it not be 
better for men to begin very soon to look the greatest reality of 
society in the face, and seriously to ask themselves upon what 
terms, in very truth, the sexes should live? And when, quite 
aside from the children, we recall all the other aspects of the 
relation; — when we count up all that woman is and may be to 
man — all that man may be and is to woman — then indeed 



188 



APPENDIX. 



even the tranquil and temperate mind must stand aghast at the 
egotism that for thousands of recoi'ded years has been so 
densely blind to its own most exquisite possibilities — nay, one 
would think, to its own most obvious satisfactions. 
"J." p. 152. 

Jesus. " I say unto you — Whosoever shall put away his 
wife except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, 
committeth adultery; and whoso marrieth her that is put 
away doth commit adultery." His disciples say unto him, 
*' If the case of a man be so with his wife (i. e. that he can not 
change her at will according to the Jewish, Greek and Roman 
custom) it is not good tomarry,'' — (Matt. 19. v 9-10.) — and for 
fifteen hundred years after, all the moral and intellectual 
leaders of Christendom scorned marriage rather than attempt 
it with Christ's condition of fidelity to one ! Martin Luther 
was the first strong man who unreservedly accepted it, and 
he, therefore, must be considered, after Jesus Christ, the 
creator of the marriage relation as the last three hundred 
years have developed it, and consequently of the modern 
Christian family. 

And by the way, it should interest women to know that 
Luther's wife, Katharine von Bora, like the wife of our own 
Washington, was a famous housekeeper. "She managed 
everything; she attended to the farm; she kept many pigs, 
and doubtless poultry also; she had a fish pond; she 
brewed beer. She had a strong, ruling, administering talent. 



APPENDIX. 189 

She was as great in her way as her husband was in his," and 
that great husband was so appreciative as to declare that — 
* Next to God's word, the world has no more preci*ous 
treasure than holy matrimony. God's best gift is a pious, 
cheerful, God-fearing, home-keeping wife to whom you can 
trust your goods and body and life." Thanks to that good 
wife, Luther's table was " always amply furnished. Great 
people, great lords, great ladies, learned men came from all 
parts of Europe, and his Wittenberg co-laborers were constant 
guests. He received them freely at dinner, and being one 
of the most copious of talkers, he enabled his friends to 
preserve a most extraordinary monument of his acquirements 
and intellectual vigor. Scarce a subject could be spoken of 
on which he had not something remarkable to say, and on 
reading the Table Talk of Luther, one ceases to wonder how 
this single man could change the whole face of Europe." 

But would he have talked so well if his dinners had been 
less satisfactory? Who indeed can say whether either Luther 
or Washington, the two greatest men in their opportunity and 
in their success since the Apostles, would have accomplished 
the vast work they did, had not their hearts been so wholly 
stayed on able and devoted wives whom they could " trust " 
with their "goods, and body and life."— Of Mrs. Washington 
it is recorded that, notable as she was in all housekeep- 
ing ways, she spent two hours every morning in her room in 
prayer and devotional reading, her face when she came out 
being often illuminated as with some divine light I 



